Strictly

This study concerns with the attitude and velocity tracking control problem for the longitudinal model of hypersonic flight vehicles, which is nonlinear in aerodynamics with model uncertainties and external disturbances. By employing back stepping sliding mode method and the strictly-lower-convex-function-constructing nonlinear disturbance observer (SNDOB), a novel composite controller is proposed to guarantee the system tracking error to converge to a small region containing the origin. Besides, several proper adaptive laws are also introduced to make the controller avoid of the differential explosion problem and be chatter-free. Compared with other robust flight control approaches, key novelties of the developed method are that one new SNDOB is proposed and drawn into the virtual control laws at each step to compensate the disturbances and that adaptive laws are utilized to simplify the tedious and complicated differential operations. Finally, it is demonstrated by the simulation results that the new method exhibits not only an excellent robustness but also a better disturbance rejection performance than the convention approach