Abstract—A hypersonic vehicle has a large flight envelope span, complicated flight environment, glaring external perturbation and unknown factor interference, being difficult to establish its precise model. Furthermore, the advanced airframe-engine integrated design technique makes it sensitive to change in flight conditions, thus challenging the design of its control system. We design the model reference variable structural control (MRVSC) scheme that can resist the internal structural parametric variation and external perturbation of the control system. The scheme has the merits of both adaptive control and variable structural control, can effectively track the reference model and resist the great parametric variation, effectively enhancing the robustness of the control system of the hypersonic vehicle. We design its pitch channel controller and roll channel controller with the model reference variable structural control theory, evaluate the performances of main design points of each channel and perform the 6-DOF simulation to verify the control system. The verification results show preliminarily that the step responses of the MRVSC we designed are basically unchangeable in the two states that the hypersonic vehicle has its cowling or no cowling, while the PID controller cannot ensure that the step responses are unchangeable when the state changes, indicating that the MRVSC scheme is superior to the PID controller when the control has uncertainties. The 6-DOF simulation results further verify that the MRVSC scheme can better resist great parametric variation and has strong robustness.

Index Terms—Classic PID, hypersonic vehicle, model reference variable structure control, robustness.

Wei Jianli, Tian Shida are with College of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 127 West Youyi Road, Xi'an Shaanxi, 710072, P. R. China.
Yao Xinghua is with Ming De College, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Chang’an Xi'an Shaanxi, 710124, P. R. China.

Cite: Wei Jianli, Tian Shida, Yao Xinghua, "Variable Structure Control for Hypersonic Vehicle Based on Model Reference," International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 144-152, 2015.