Robust path following for autonomous vehicles with spatial PH quintic splines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust path following method for autonomous vehicles using spatial PH quintic spline curves, accommodating both fully-actuated and under-actuated systems while considering environmental disturbances.

Contribution

It presents a novel guidance law based on PH spline curves that is robust to disturbances and applicable to various vehicle actuation configurations.

Findings

Effective control strategy validated through numerical experiments

Suitable for both kinematic and dynamic simulations

Handles environmental disturbances like wind and currents

Abstract

The distinctive feature of a polynomial parametric speed let polynomial Pythagorean-hodograph (PH) curves be attractive for the design of accurate and efficient application algorithms. We propose a robust path following scheme for the construction of smooth spatial motions by exploiting PH spline curves. In order to cover a general configuration setting, we present a guidance law which is suitable both for fully-actuated and (more common) under-actuated vehicles, which cannot control all the degrees of freedom. The robustness of the guidance law is enhanced by also taking into account the influence of wind or currents into the equations of motion. A selection of numerical experiments validates the effectiveness of the control strategy when $C^1$ spatial PH quintic interpolants are suitably considered for both kinematic and dynamic simulations.