Robust Switching Control for Hypersonic Vehicles, Phase I

Flight in the hypersonic regime is critical to NASA's goals because access to earth orbit and re-entry from orbit to earth or to other planets with atmospheres require flight through this regime. Hypersonic flight poses a wide array of difficulties, including significant guidance and control challenges. For example, flexible airframes and highly integrated airframe and propulsion systems common in scramjet designs mean that aerodynamic and propulsion control are closely coupled. Control laws for hypersonic vehicles must also handle a very broad range of dynamics as hypersonic vehicles often operate from subsonic through hypersonic speeds and possibly with multiple propulsion modes for different speed ranges. Actuator saturation and significant models uncertainty also pose control challenges, and demanding energy management requirements make guidance and trajectory optimization challenging tasks as well. The proposed research will develop innovative control strategies to address the challenges of hypersonic flight. These will be based on recent advances in switching control methods that provide large stable regions and disturbance rejection guarantees in the presence of actuator saturation. The proposed control methods will ultimately be integrated with advanced guidance approaches for hypersonic vehicles developed by Barron Associates.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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