Hypersonic vehicle guidance based on path-following

A new trajectory tracking scheme for hypersonic vehicles is proposed aiming at providing a high landing precision, based on the concept of path-following and adaptive dynamic surface control (ADSC). A mathematical model is established according to the dynamics of hypersonic vehicles, and a partial linearization is conducted to derive the model suitable for tracking control. The 3-D trajectory-tracking for hypersonic gliding vehicles is an under-actuated problem, so the concept of path-following is adopted to transform it into a 2-D tracking problem. An ADSC method is adopted in the tracking control to provide robustness under model uncertainties. It is proofed that the tracking error of the proposed method can be arbitrarily small. Finally the high precision and robustness of the guidance scheme are verified through numerical simulation.