Safety–Critical Control for Hypersonic Vehicles with Angle of Attack Constraint

This paper proposes and verifies a safety–critical control scheme for hypersonic vehicles (HSVs) with angle of attack (AOA) constraint. Firstly, the dynamic model of HSV is decomposed into a velocity subsystem and an altitude subsystem, where the matched and mismatched disturbances are estimated by a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) and compensated by a normal controller. Furthermore, the control barrier function (CBF) is improved by introducing disturbance observations, and the control problem with AOA constraint is transformed into a quadratic programming (QP) problem. Finally, the simulation results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controllers, and the AOA does not violate the constraint during the control procedure.