Nonlinear prescribed performance sliding mode control of hypersonic vehicles

Summary This paper addresses the adaptive saturation prescribed performance control problem for air‐breathing hypersonic vehicles with parameter uncertainties and unknown external disturbances. First of all, different from the traditional performance function, a novel class of performance functions is presented without the initial state information, which does not require to reset parameters even if the initial velocity and altitude change. To ensure the successful design of the velocity controller and altitude controller, the constrained errors are transformed into the unconstrained errors by the projection technique. Secondly, the adaptive neural network and the sliding mode control techniques are combined to design the adaptive neural network sliding mode controllers, which guarantee that the velocity and altitude tracking errors can respectively approach the predetermined regions within the identical preset finite time. Finally, the effectiveness of the designed controllers is verified by an example with comparisons.