Three dimensional moving path following for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Moving Path Following (MPF) control laws allows an autonomous vehicle to converge to and follow a path that is moving with respect to an inertial frame. This paper formally extends the MPF methods present in the literature to the case of three dimensional paths that can be moving with time-varying linear and angular velocities with respect to an inertial frame. A 3D MPF error space and a MPF Lyapunov-based control law is derived at kinematic level for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. Formal convergence proofs and validation using flight test results are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.