Immersion and invariance-based integrated guidance and control for unmanned aerial vehicle path following

ABSTRACT

An integrated guidance and control scheme is proposed on path following for the unmanned aerial vehicle. It is capable of handling the coupled non-linearities of the path's kinematics and the aircraft's dynamics independently. In the path coordinate, the guidance law is designed based on a nominal model, and the non-linearity of the path's kinematics is taken into full consideration. In the time coordinate, the flight control law is designed as a feed-forward controller, and it can guarantee the robustness of the guidance law with respect to the actual aircraft's dynamics. Instead of only employing Lyapunov method, the concept of immersion and invariance is also applied to explicitly analyse the stability in both time and path coordinates, and the asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed. What is more, the regulation-based and immersion-based adaptive technologies are synthetically utilised to handle the unknown parameters. Finally, the numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed integrated guidance and control scheme.

KEYWORDS:

• Unmanned aerial vehicle
• integrated guidance and control
• immersion and invariance
• path following

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kenan Yong  http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9464-9297

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 61751210], Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation of China [No. BK20171417] and Funding of Jiangsu Innovation Program for Graduate Education [No. KYCX18_0298].

Notes on contributors

Kenan Yong

Kenan Yong received the B.S. degree and the M.S. degree in control theory and control engineering from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), Nanjing, China, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at NUAA, Nanjing, China. His current research interests include nonlinear system control, robust control and their applications in aerospace engineering.

Mou Chen

Mou Chen received the B.S. degree in material science and engineering and Ph.D. degree in control theory and control engineering from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), Nanjing, China, in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a Full Professor with the College of Automation Engineering, NUAA. He was an Academic Visitor with the Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough, U.K., from November 2007 to February 2008. From June 2008 to September 2009, he was a Research Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore. He was a Senior Academic Visitor with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia, in 2014 for six months. His current research interests include nonlinear system control, intelligent control and flight control.

Qingxian Wu

Qingxian Wu received the M.S. degree from Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He is currently a Full Professor with the College of Automation Engineering, NUAA, China. His research interests include nonlinear system control, robust control and flight control.