Coordinated Design of Intelligent Morphing Decision and Entry Guidance for Morphing Hypersonic Glide Vehicles

Due to the coupled effects of the morphing variable and the angle of attack on aerodynamic characteristics, the design of the morphing decision and entry guidance for morphing hypersonic vehicles would exhibit a confrontation without the coordination framework. The existing coordinated design methods still suffer from limited morphing functionality and inadequate consideration of constraints. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel coordinated design method of morphing decision and entry guidance for morphing hypersonic glide vehicles, employing reinforcement learning in the morphing decision to enhance online autonomous decision-making capability. Firstly, the coordination framework of morphing decision and entry guidance with a bank-angle-reversal event-triggered strategy is established considering multiple flight constraints. Under the proposed coordination framework, the analytic commands of the angle of attack and bank angle are designed by introducing real-time state feedback, achieving rapid command generation without the need for terminal state prediction. Furthermore, a reinforcement-learning-based morphing strategy is developed considering various action intentions in the entry phase, matching the flight maneuverability with its intended actions. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show that the proposed method can prevent the confrontation between the morphing decision and entry guidance. Compared with the fixed-shape hypersonic glide vehicle, the morphing vehicle with the proposed method improves its success rate of no-fly zone avoidance and enhances the terminal position accuracy without significantly increasing the number of bank angle reversals.