Non-singular moving path following control for an unmanned aerial vehicle under wind disturbances

This paper further investigates the moving path following (MPF) problem for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) proposed in [1], where an UAV is tasked to converge to and follow a desired geometric moving path without an explicit timing law assigned to it. A new type of control strategy is proposed to steer the UAV to follow a reference moving path in the presence of wind disturbances, which relaxes the conservative assumption given in [1] that the vehicle will not be exactly at the distance from the closest path point that corresponds to the inverse of the path's curvature at that point. This is done by controlling the progression rate of the virtual target vehicle which is tracked by the real vehicle and travelling along the reference path. To achieve smooth convergence of the UAV to the desired path, the transient maneuver is shaped as a function of the MPF position error. Stability analyses indicate that convergence of the MPF error to zero can be achieved asymptotically. The efficacy of the proposed approach is evaluated by a numerical simulation using an UAV to track a moving ground target.