Disturbance rejection control for attitude control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles with actuator dynamics

A novel disturbance rejection control scheme is proposed to address the robust attitude control problem for the air-breathing hypersonic vehicle with actuator dynamics and disturbances based on predictive sliding mode control and nonlinear disturbance observer. To achieve attitude control subtly and precisely, the attitude control system is decomposed into two subsystems: the outer-loop subsystem and inner-loop subsystem. Different control schemes are taken to attenuate or reject model uncertainties and external disturbances, whose influences on the two subsystems are different. The predictive sliding mode control is first utilized to attenuate model uncertainties imposed on the outer-loop subsystem. Then, a novel nonlinear disturbance observer–based predictive sliding mode control is proposed to tackle the mismatched disturbances with remarkable influence on the inner-loop subsystem. Afterward, both the effectiveness and stability of the proposed nonlinear disturbance observer–based predictive sliding mode control disturbance rejection control scheme are demonstrated from the theoretical prospective. Finally, simulation results are given to present the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed disturbance rejection control scheme.