Path-Following Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Bounded Lateral Acceleration
For UAV control engineers, this provides a practical guidance solution that respects actuator limits without heuristic saturation handling, improving safety and performance in real-world applications.
This paper proposes a nonlinear path-following guidance law for UAVs that explicitly incorporates bounded lateral acceleration constraints, achieving exponential convergence of cross-track errors with guaranteed bounded control inputs. Simulations show superior tracking performance and reduced control effort compared to existing methods.
This paper addresses the three-dimensional path-following guidance problem for unmanned aerial vehicles under explicit actuator constraints. Unlike conventional approaches that assume unbounded control inputs or handle saturation heuristically, the proposed method incorporates bounded lateral acceleration directly into the guidance design. A nonlinear guidance framework is developed employing a nested saturation-based control technique. The proposed guidance strategy guarantees bounded control inputs while ensuring exponential convergence of cross-track errors to zero. The formulation is applicable to general smooth paths and is systematically extended from planar to three-dimensional scenarios using a path-tangent coordinate framework. Rigorous stability analysis based on Lyapunov theory establishes convergence and feasibility properties of the closed-loop system. Numerical simulations on representative paths, including straight-line, circular, and sinusoidal paths, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior tracking performance, reduced control effort, and robustness against disturbances compared to existing guidance laws. The simplicity of the design and its compatibility with practical actuator limits make it suitable for real-world UAV applications.