Abstract
To greatly extend the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles, automation systems for the various piloting functions are being developed. However, the development of these auto-systems is not without challenges. One of these challenges is the ability to prove the robustness of an autonomous system against unpredicted events. For the navigation task, this means to prove that the system can recover safely after a deviation from the original plan. In a decoupled scheme where the planner generates a plan online and the controller executes the plan, it is difficult to prove the safety of a system exhaustively. Conversely, using a feedback motion plan generated off-line, it is possible to pre-verify and pre-approve a large number of cases simultaneously. Therefore, it is easier to prove system safety. In this work, this approach is utilized to integrate the guidance toward a target location or a target path with geofence avoidance and recovery for a fully autonomous fixed-wing aircraft. Our formulation extends the wavefront expansion to the case of vehicles having minimum turning radius constraints. The solution is suitable for both single goal missions and path following problems in presence of geofences that can have both convex and non-convex shape. The main novelties introduced in the proposed method are the followings: (1) path following in presence of obstacles having an arbitrary shape, (2) definition of a transition function for the rotation of the flow around the predefined path, (3) use of a Gaussian filter to smooth the vector field. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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Notes
With a little abuse of notation, we use x to indicate both the state and the state variable that corresponds to the coordinate in the Euclidean space.
With “similar,” we mean that the lateral motion of the physical model is very close to the lateral motion of the UAV used in our experiments.
In [55] there is a video showing one of these flight tests.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported under NASA cooperative Agreement Number NND13AB04A. The authors would like to thank Dr. Joshua Schultz and Dr. Heng-Ming Tai for their valuable inputs to this work.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Derivation of the control law
In this appendix, we derive the control law in (22). The autopilot used in our setup generates lateral acceleration commands. Such commands are generated using the nonlinear control law derived in [51] with a small variation. In [51] the required centripetal acceleration is computed as follows:
where \(\xi \) and \(\text {T}\) are tuning parameters defined, respectively, damping and period. In the autopilot [52] used in our setup, the (24) is modified by replacing the constant 2 with the term \(K_{L1}\) as follows:
Exploiting that the turn rate can be obtained from the centripetal acceleration and the speed:
we can obtain the control law in (22) from (26) as follows:
Appendix B: Additional flight data
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Miraglia, G., Hook, L.R., Fiorenzani, T. et al. Discrete vector fields for 2-D navigation under minimum turning radius constraints. Intel Serv Robotics 13, 343–363 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-020-00317-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-020-00317-8