On the design of gain‐scheduled trajectory tracking controllers

Abstract

SUMMARYA new methodology is proposed for the design of trajectory tracking controllers for autonomous vehicles. The design technique builds on gain scheduling control theory. An application is made to the design of a trajectory tracking controller for a prototype autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The effectiveness and advantages of the new control laws derived are illustrated in simulation using a full set of non-linear equations of motion of the vehicle.

Robust adaptive tracking control of underactuated ODINs under stochastic sea loads

“…The control design proposed in this paper can be straightforwardly combined with the method of using both Euler angles and unit-quaternion for the attitude representation of the ODIN in [13] to obtain a trajectory tracking controller in threedimensional space. This paper also serves as a base to redesign controllers developed for other types of ocean vehicles such as surface ships and underwater vehicles in [18][19][20][22][23][24][28][29][30][31][32] under stochastic sea loads instead of treating them as deterministic or neglecting them.…”

“…Controlling underactuated surface ships with input constraints was also addressed in [25][26][27]. In addition, several authors have studied the problem of controlling underactuated underwater vehicles in [28][29][30][31][32][33][34].…”

Cooperative control of small UAVs for naval applications

“…The development of a control system -to track desired paths -followed the methodology for the design of path following controllers presented in [2], [3] which can be briefly explained as follows. The trimming trajectories of the UAV are easily seen to be helices, which can degenerate into straight lines and circumferences.…”

Close tracking of equilibrium paths

“…Recently, adaptive and robust controllers have been developed for tensegrity‐membrane systems deployment and to track desired trajectories generated using equilibrium paths. Equilibrium paths are also used in gain scheduling, where the standard approach is to linearize the nonlinear system about several equilibrium points that may belong to the same equilibrium path to obtain a parameterized family of linearized plants that are used to design gain‐scheduled controllers (see the work of Silvestre et al for details and an application to an unmanned vehicle control problem). Related to this, linear parameter‐varying (LPV) control methods provide systematic designs of controllers that may include performance and robustness objectives in the design process (see the works of Balas for an exposition of LPV control with application to turbofan engine control and Shu and Sultan for LPV control applied to a tensegrity‐membrane system).…”