The application of intelligent search strategies to robust flight control for hypersonic vehicles

1993 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved. Intelligent search techniques are uniquely combined with conventional analytical control methods to address the difficulties associated with real-time flight control for air breathing hypersonic vehicles. Flight control for these vehicles is particularly difficult due the combination of strict performance requirements, nonlinear dynamics, model uncertainty, complex constraint, and bounded disturbances. These problems have motivated the development of a new approach, called Robust Intelligent Control (RIC), which is capable of robust, real-time, short-term trajectory planning. Stable tracking of a desired trajectory is achieved by solving a constrained receding-horizon nonlinear optimal control problem via intelligent optimization methods. A viable correction trajectory is generated, followed for a short interval of time, and then recomputed. The RIC approach consists of an enhanced A* optimization technique that incorporates a Lyapunov stability criterion in a highly parallelizable algorithm. The efficiency of the A* search, and the theoretical guarantees of a Lyapunov method, are both achieved. The algorithm is demonstrated and evaluated using a realistic hypersonic vehicle simulation that has been developed for this research.

The application of intelligent search strategies to robust flight control for hypersonic vehicles Conference Paper