Abstract
Supersonic Tailless Aerial Vehicles (STAVs) will become an essential force in Penetrating Counter Air (PCA), but STAVs do not have the traditional horizontal and vertical tails, making pitch and yaw control difficult. The attack angle and the sideslip angle need to be limited to ensure that the engine inlet and the aerodynamic rudder at the rear of the vehicle can work properly, which is the so-called security constraints. In addition, the tracking error of the aerodynamic angle needs to be limited to achieve effective attitude control or high-accuracy tracking of trajectories, which is the so-called performance constraints. To this end, an attitude control method that meets the needs of PCA has been devised, based on constraint definition, coupled constraints handling, and control law design. Firstly, mathematical descriptions of the security constraints, performance constraints, and control constraints are given. Secondly, two treatment methods, coupled command filter and coupled funnel control are proposed for the aerodynamic angle coupled constraint problem. Finally, based on Nonlinear Dynamic Inverse (NDI) design, the coupled funnel controller is designed and validated by simulation for two typical mission scenarios, high-altitude penetration and low-altitude surprise defence. The proposed control method not only satisfies the security and performance constraints of STAV attitude control but also is highly robust.
