Event-Triggered Distributed Containment Control for Networked Hypersonic Flight Vehicles

This article tackles the distributed output-feedback containment control task for networked hypersonic flight vehicles (HFVs) in the presence of limited communication resources. Distinctive with the state-of-the-art control methodologies designed for single/multiple HFVs, the distinguishing features of our design lie in that: 1) a novel switching event-triggered information transmission mechanism embedded with an error-dependent monotonically decreasing power term is devised in such a way that the frequencies of data transmission among distinct HFVs can be significantly reduced, while at the same time maintaining desired consensus tracking errors; 2) a new set of error variables is delicately formulated such that the containment control task is realized in the sense that all follower HFVs are ensured to converge to a dynamic convex hull formed by leader HFVs; and 3) the priori knowledge of flight state variables is not required during the control design. To be precise, a high-gain observer is resorted to tackle the challenge that the attitude angles information is normally difficult to be obtained precisely in a practical hypersonic regime. Comparative simulation tests are finally carried out to validate the superiorities of the obtained theoretical findings.