HIFiRE 6: An Adaptive Flight Control Experiment

The Hypersonic International Flight Research Program (HIFiRE) is an international collaboration between the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defence Science Technology Organisation in Australia. The HIFiRE program is investigating basic hypersonic phenomena and experimental technologies critical to the development of next generation aerospace vehicles and the understanding of the environments in which they must operate. Further this program will advance the state-of-the-art in a number of disciplines by progressively evaluating component technologies having increasing levels of complexity and likeness to those of expected operational systems. The approach is to utilize sounding rockets in order to mature a low-cost approach to hypersonic flight test. To this end, HIFiRE 6 will evaluate the tracking performance of an adaptive flight control system on a representative hypersonic vehicle that is executing a set of predefined maneuvers. This paper describes the current HIFiRE 6 mission and vehicle system to execute the experiment, along with a description of the adaptive control law and simulation results.