A hybrid feedback control strategy for autonomous waypoint transitioning and loitering of unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract We consider the problem of autonomously controlling a fixed-wing aerial vehicle to visit a neighborhood of a pre-defined waypoint, and when nearby it, loiter around it. To solve this problem, we propose a hybrid feedback control strategy that unites two state-feedback controllers: a transit controller capable of steering or transitioning the vehicle to nearby the waypoint and a loiter controller capable of steering the vehicle about a loitering radius. The aerial vehicle is modeled on a level flight plane with system performance characterized in terms of the aerodynamic, propulsion, and mass properties. Thrust and bank angle are the control inputs. Asymptotic stability properties of the individual control algorithms, which are designed using backstepping, as well as of the closed-loop system, which includes a hybrid algorithm uniting the two controllers, are established. In particular, for this application of hybrid feedback control, Lyapunov functions and hybrid systems theory are employed to establish stability properties of the set of points defining loitering. The analytical results are confirmed numerically by simulations.

[1]  Tong Heng Lee,et al.  Developments in hybrid modeling and control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation.

[2]  Panagiotis Tsiotras,et al.  Bank-to-Turn Control for a Small UAV using Backstepping and Parameter Adaptation , 2008 .

[3]  Ricardo G. Sanfelice,et al.  Hybrid Dynamical Systems: Modeling, Stability, and Robustness , 2012 .

[4]  Ricardo G. Sanfelice,et al.  A toolbox for simulation of hybrid systems in matlab/simulink: hybrid equations (HyEQ) toolbox , 2013, HSCC '13.

[5]  Eric W. Frew,et al.  Lyapunov Vector Fields for Autonomous Unmanned Aircraft Flight Control , 2008 .

[6]  Peter Kuster,et al.  Nonlinear And Adaptive Control Design , 2016 .

[7]  Munther A. Dahleh,et al.  Maneuver-based motion planning for nonlinear systems with symmetries , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[8]  P. Olver.  Nonlinear Systems , 2013 .

[9]  Daniel P. Raymer,et al.  Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach , 1989 .

[10]  Anna Witkowska,et al.  Nonlinear backstepping ship course controller , 2009, Int. J. Autom. Comput..

[11]  Ricardo G. Sanfelice,et al.  Supervising a family of hybrid controllers for robust global asymptotic stabilization , 2008, 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[12]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  A New Nonlinear Guidance Logic for Trajectory Tracking , 2004 .

[13]  Christophe Prieur.  Uniting Local and Global Controllers with Robustness to Vanishing Noise , 2001, Math. Control. Signals Syst..

[14]  Vicente Parra-Vega,et al.  Chattering‐free sliding mode control for a class of nonlinear mechanical systems , 2001 .

[15]  Denis Efimov,et al.  Robust output stabilization: Improving performance via supervisory control , 2009, 0906.0437.

[16]  D.A. Lawrence,et al.  Lyapunov Guidance Vector Fields for Unmanned Aircraft Applications , 2007, 2007 American Control Conference.

[17]  A.R. Teel,et al.  A "Throw-and-Catch" Hybrid Control Strategy for Robust Global Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems , 2007, 2007 American Control Conference.

[18]  E. Frazzoli,et al.  A hybrid control framework for robust maneuver-based motion planning , 2008, 2008 American Control Conference.

[19]  Chaohong Cai,et al.  Characterizations of input-to-state stability for hybrid systems , 2009, Syst. Control. Lett..

[20]  Ricardo G. Sanfelice.  Robust Asymptotic Stabilization of Hybrid Systems using Control Lyapunov Functions , 2016, HSCC.

[21]  Rafal Goebel,et al.  Hybrid Feedback Control and Robust Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.