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Optimal Path Following for Small Fixed-Wing UAVs Under Wind Disturbances

Yang, Jun; Liu, Cunjia; Coombes, Matthew; Yan, Yunda; Chen, Wen-Hua; (2021) Optimal Path Following for Small Fixed-Wing UAVs Under Wind Disturbances. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology , 29 (3) pp. 996-1008. 10.1109/TCST.2020.2980727. Green open access

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Abstract

This article presents a novel path-following algorithm for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles by virtue of a nonlinear optimal control approach and wind disturbance observers. Different from some exiting algorithms, the proposed algorithm formulates the path-following problem into a control problem by introducing auxiliary dynamics for the path parameter. The proposed controller is designed in an optimal and systematic manner where the control action is generated according to a well-defined cost function. This framework does not require any complex geometric coordinate transformation and can be easily tuned to accommodate curved reference paths, making it straightforward to deploy in different flight missions. Moreover, the wind influences on the path-following performance is explicitly compensated by the proposed algorithm based on the wind estimates provided by nonlinear disturbance observers. The closed-loop stability, including the auxiliary dynamics for path parameter and observer dynamics for wind estimation, is also analyzed. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm have been thoroughly validated in simulation studies and realistic flight tests.

Type: Article
Title: Optimal Path Following for Small Fixed-Wing UAVs Under Wind Disturbances
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2020.2980727
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2020.2980727
Language: English
Additional information: This is an Open Access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Disturbance observer, optimal control, path following, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10188634
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