Adaptive path following for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in time-varying unknown wind environments

Abstract

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) path following under slowly time-varying wind is developed. The proposed control strategy integrates the path following law based on the vector field method with an adaptive term counteracting the effect of wind's unknown component. In particular, it is shown that the path following error is bounded under slowly time-varying unknown wind and converges to zero for unknown constant wind. Numerical simulations illustrate that, in environments with unknown and slowly time-varying wind conditions, the proposed method compensates for the lack of knowledge of the wind vector, and attains a smaller path following error than state-of-the-art vector field method.