Data fusion-based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Hypersonic Waverider Configuration

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) investigates key technologies to implement hypersonic flight systems in various mission scenarios. In recent years, hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) received significant attention from academia and industry. HGV configurations can be used for civil and military purposes, operate over broad flight envelopes, and pose complex flight dynamic characteristics. This paper presents a hypersonic glide vehicle concept developed by DLR and gives a high-level overview on the established GNC system. Further, it proposes a data fusion-based nonlinear flight control architecture based on incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion, nonlinear model following control, and complementary filter theory. Since the considered vehicle possesses a redundant set of control effectors, an optimization-based control allocation approach is utilized to regulate the system dynamics. The proposed control architecture is first introduced and discussed. Later, robustness and performance investigations are conducted for validation purposes, using high-fidelity nonlinear flight dynamic simulations both in the nominal case and with model/sensor uncertainties. The acquired results indicate that the proposed strategy provides significant benefits for the robust nonlinear control of the hypersonic system.