Separate Guidance and Control Design for Autonomous Path-following

Abstract

This paper addresses the separate guidance and control design for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to follow the desired path with arbitrary curvature. The proposed design is appealing since it neither requires the information about the path curvature to be implemented nor necessitates tracking a moving virtual target. Such a feature makes our design simple and elegant. We first show that it is sufficient to nullify the UAV's perpendicular distance with respect to the path in order for it to track and follow the desired path and that there is no restriction on the UAV's initial configuration. This makes the proposed design globally valid. Next, we augment the UAV's guidance system with an autopilot obtained by approximating its higher-order dynamics as a second-order transfer function. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed design through simulations for various scenarios.