A Robust Path Following Controller for a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Constrained Parameters Optimized

Abstract

This paper proposes a nonlinear controller that allows the unmanned air vehicle (UAV) to follow a predefined path. The controller only needs the information of the inertial speed of the UAV and the distance between the vehicle and the desired path. In order to improve the performance of the controller, a parameter of the controller is optimized by using the concept of model predictive control (MPC). Lyapunov stability arguments are used to demonstrate that the path following error will be regulated to zero, even in the presence of wind disturbances. Simulation results in Matlab are given to show the effectiveness of the controller. The simulation results show that the proposed path following controller with parameter optimized by MPC (PLC_MPC) which takes the advantages of the predictive ability of the MPC and the simple structure of the normal path following controller (PLC) has better path following performance than that by using the PLC method.