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

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.