This article solves the fixed-time trajectory tracking problem for hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) encountered with diverse actuator faults and asymmetric envelope constraints. In contrast to the state of the art, the crucial characteristics of our design lie in obviating the explosion of complexity of the conventional recursive design, and in realizing satisfactory preselected tracking qualities for flight states in the sense of guaranteeing asymmetric envelope constraints. More precisely, by exploiting the fixed-time command filters to produce certain command signals and their derivatives, a modified command-filtered control algorithm is formulated to circumvent heavy computation burden caused by repetitive derivative of intermediate control laws. A two-step control methodology is devised based on an auxiliary compensating dynamics, which is capable of compensating for the actuator faults completely without the need for prior knowledge about the lumped disturbances and the actuator faults. Time-varying asymmetric barrier Lyapunov functions are introduced to confine the flight state tracking errors within the corresponding time-varying compact sets all the time provided their initial values remain therein. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by comparative simulation results.

A new fixed-time fuzzy adaptive fault-tolerant control methodology is proposed for the longitudinal dynamics of hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) in the presence of actuator faults, uncertain dynamics, and external disturbances. In contrast with the conventional fixed-time control schemes that typically contain the fractional powers of errors in their designs, this work develops a low-complexity control structure in the sense of removing the dependence on the need of abovementioned fractional power terms by means of prescribed performance control (PPC) method. Different from the most existing PPC approaches where the initial conditions of tracking errors are required to be known, the newly proposed prescribed performance function (PPF) can relax such restrictions through choosing properly small initial values of PPF. Fuzzy logic systems (FLSs) are employed to handle unknown dynamics, and minimal learning parameter (MLP) technique is incorporated into the design for the purpose of alleviating computation burden. Closed-loop stability is rigorously proved via Lyapunov stability theory, and simulation results are eventually given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

A novel accurate tracking controller is developed for the longitudinal dynamics of Hypersonic Flight Vehicles (HFVs) in the presence of large model uncertainties, external disturbances and actuator nonlinearities. Distinct from the state-of-the-art, besides being continuity, no restrictive conditions have been imposed on the HFVs dynamics. The system uncertainties are skillfully handled by being seen as bounded “disturbance terms”. In addition, by means of back-stepping adaptive technique, the accurate tracking (i.e. tracking errors converge to zero as time approaches infinity) rather than bounded tracking (i.e. tracking errors converge to residual sets) has been achieved. What's more, the accurate tracking problems for HFVs subject to actuator dead-zone and hysteresis are discussed, respectively. Then, all signals of closed-loop system are verified to be Semi-Global Uniformly Ultimate Boundness (SGUUB). Finally, the efficacy and superiority of the developed control strategy are confirmed by simulation results.

This work for the first time develops a neuro-adaptive control strategy for an extended class of longitudinal dynamics of hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs). To handle with the design difficulty that the uncertain time-varying disturbances appear implicitly in HFVs dynamics, a new function approximator is designed by incorporating the fourier series expansion (FSE) into the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs). An integral term and a linear term are, respectively, constructed to speed up the convergence rate and compensate for the negative effects caused by approximation errors. It is rigorously proved that all closed-loop signals are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB). Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control methodology.