Hypersonic vehicles traveling at speeds greater than Mach 5 have great potential to revolutionize atmospheric flight and are currently under development for commercial and defense applications. The highly nonlinear and uncertain dynamics of hypersonic vehicles makes it challenging to excite large amplitude motion of the prototype test vehicle with guarantees of robustness and safety. Standard nonlinear control techniques (e.g., feedback linearization, back-stepping, sliding- mode control) typically require some knowledge of the analytic form of the system's nonlinearities. This is not necessarily possible with hypersonic vehicles (e.g., aerodynamic information may only be known at discrete data points).

PhD student Sze Kwan Cheah (Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics), in a project called “In-flight Data-Driven Robust Control of Hypersonic Vehicle for Autonomous Flight Testing,” is developing a data-driven robust controller for hypersonic vehicle test vehicle by leverage collected flight data for in-flight adjustments.

Some funding for this project was provided by a 2023 University of Minnesota Informatics Institute MnDRIVE PhD Graduate Assistantship. The UMII MnDRIVE Graduate Assistantship program supports U of M PhD candidates pursuing research at the intersection of informatics and any of the five MnDRIVE areas:

  • Robotics
  • Global Food
  • Environment
  • Brain Conditions
  • Cancer Clinical Trials

This project is part of the Robotics MnDRIVE area. See the complete list of the UMII Graduate Assistantships for 2023.

flowchart of controller operation, and a photo of an advanced aircraft