Cascaded Active Disturbance Rejection Control for Near space Vehicle Autopilot

There exists a steady-state error in the closed-loop system output with some conventional linear active rejection control approaches when the pitch channel control variable of the near space vehicle is the angle of attack. In this study, a cascaded linear active disturbance rejection control approach based on the cascaded control idea is proposed. Both the inner-loop controller and the outer-loop controller are designed by the linear active disturbance rejection control method. The inner-loop is built by angular rate feedback to improve dynamic performance of the closed-loop system, and the outer-loop is built by angle of attack feedback to remove the undesired steady-state error. The approach is employed to a hypersonic near space vehicle autopilot. The numerical simulations show that the proposed approach preserves the performances on time domain and frequency domain as good as those of the conventional active disturbance rejection control approaches, and it has the better performances on disturbance rejection and angle of attack command tracking accuracy than those of some previous active disturbance rejection control approaches.