Abstract
This paper considers UAV path following in cluttered environments under windy conditions. Unstructured wind patterns in cluttered environments can make path following difficult resulting in high errors and possibly collisions with buildings. Combining a pursuit guidance law philosophy with a line-of-sight guidance law, we develop a novel guidance law that has low computational complexity and can track straight line paths, circular paths, a combination of both and waypaths accurately in the presence of wind blowing as high as fifty percent of the UAV’s air speed. Performance of the guidance law is demonstrated through numerical simulations.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Zarchan, P.: Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance. AIAA Inc., Washington (1990)
Shehab, S., Rodrigues, L.: Preliminary results on UAV path following using piecewise-affine control. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Control Applications, pp. 358–363. IEEE, Toronto, (2005)
Breivik, M., Fossen, T.I.: Principles of guidance-based path following in 2D and 3D. In: Proceeding of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, pp. 627–634. IEEE, Seville (2005)
Kaminer, I., Yakimenko, O., Pascoal, A., Ghabcheloo, R.: Path generation, path following and coordinated control for time critical missions of multiple UAVs. In: Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp. 4906–4913. IEEE, Minneapolis, MN (2006)
Cao, C., Hovakimyan, N., Kaminer, I., Patel, V., Dobrokhodov, V.: Stabilization of cascaded systems via L1 adaptive controller with application to a UAV path following problem and flight test result. In: Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp. 1787–1792. IEEE, New York, NY (2007)
Nelson, D., Barber, D., McLain, T., Beard, R.: Vector field path following for small unmanned air vehicles. In: Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp. 5788–5794. IEEE, Minneapolis, MN (2006)
Rysdyk, R.: UAV path following for constant line-of-sight. In: AIAA Unmanned Unlimited Systems, Technologies and Operations Aerospace, Land and Sea Conference. AIAA, San Diego (2003)
Lawrence, D., Frew, E., Pisano, W.: Lyapunov vector fields for autonomous UAV flight control. In: AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference and Exhibit, pp. 2007–6317. AIAA, Hilton Head, SC (2007)
Park, S., Deystt, J., How, J.: Performance and Lyapunov stability of a nonlinear path-following guidance method. J. Guid. Control. Dyn. 30(6), 1718–1728 (2007)
Tsourdos, A., White, B.A., Shanmugavel, M.: Cooperative Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. Wiley, John & Sons (2010)
Kothari, M., Postlethwaite, I.: A probabilistically robust path planning algorithm for UAVs using rapidly-exploring random trees. J. Intell. Robot. Syst. 71(2), 231–253 (2013)
Anderson, E.P., Beard, R.W., McLain, T.W.: Real-time dynamic trajectory smoothing for unmanned air vehicles. IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol. 13(3), 471–477 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kothari, M., Postlethwaite, I. & Gu, DW. UAV Path Following in Windy Urban Environments. J Intell Robot Syst 74, 1013–1028 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9873-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9873-z