Title
Gone With The Wind: Nonlinear Guidance For Small Fixed-Wing Aircraft In Arbitrarily Strong Windfields
Abstract
The recent years have witnessed increased development of small, autonomous fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In order to unlock widespread applicability of these platforms, they need to be capable of operating under a variety of environmental conditions. Due to their small size, low weight, and low speeds, they require the capability of coping with wind speeds that are approaching or even faster than the nominal airspeed. In this paper we present a principled nonlinear guidance strategy, addressing this problem. More broadly, we propose a methodology for the high-level control of non-holonomic unicycle-like vehicles in the presence of strong flowfields (e.g. winds, underwater currents) which may outreach the maximum vehicle speed. The proposed strategy guarantees convergence to a safe and stable vehicle configuration with respect to the flowfield, while preserving some tracking performance with respect to the target path. Evaluations in simulations and a challenging real-world flight experiment in very windy conditions confirm the feasibility of the proposed guidance approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.23919/ACC.2017.7963609
2017 AMERICAN CONTROL CONFERENCE (ACC)
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
abs/1609.07577
0743-1619
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.40
4
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Furieri110.40
Thomas Stastny2267.63
Lorenzo Marconi384593.46
Roland Siegwart47640551.49
Igor Gilitschenski57813.89