Trajectory Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in 3D Spaces under Motion Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a 3D nonlinear trajectory tracking control strategy for UAVs that considers spatial constraints and limited inertia information, ensuring robust convergence in practical applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel control approach that incorporates spatial constraints and robustness to unmodeled dynamics for UAV trajectory tracking.

Findings

UAVs converge to desired paths while maintaining bounded states.

The control strategy is effective under limited inertia information.

Numerical simulations validate the approach's robustness and accuracy.

Abstract

This article presents a three-dimensional nonlinear trajectory tracking control strategy for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of spatial constraints. As opposed to many existing control strategies, which do not consider spatial constraints, the proposed strategy considers spatial constraints on each degree of freedom movement of the UAV. Such consideration makes the design appealing for many practical applications, such as pipeline inspection, boundary tracking, etc. The proposed design accounts for the limited information about the inertia matrix, thereby affirming its inherent robustness against unmodeled dynamics and other imperfections. We rigorously show that the UAV will converge to its desired path by maintaining bounded position, orientation, and linear and angular speeds. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy through various numerical simulations.