Geometric Look-Angle Shaping Strategy for Enclosed Inspection

TL;DR

This paper presents GLASS, a geometric look-angle shaping strategy for UAVs that ensures stable, globally convergent guidance for enclosed inspections, overcoming limitations of traditional methods.

Contribution

Introduction of a hyperbolic-tangent shaping function within a polar framework for UAV guidance, guaranteeing global stability and feasibility in enclosed inspection tasks.

Findings

Demonstrates asymptotic convergence to desired inspection standoff

Ensures guidance stability under maximum turn-rate constraints

Validated through high-fidelity quadrotor simulations

Abstract

This paper introduces inspection through GLASS, a Geometric Look-Angle Shaping Strategy for enclosed regions using unmanned aerial vehicles. In doing so, the vehicles guidance command is constructed through a bounded, geometry-consistent shaping of the look angle relative to a desired standoff path. By embedding a smooth, hyperbolic-tangent-type shaping function within a polar geometric framework, GLASS ensures global existence of the guidance dynamics. It avoids the far-field limitations inherent to conventional formulations. Lyapunov stability analysis establishes asymptotic convergence to a prescribed inspection standoff under explicit curvature feasibility conditions, along with analytical settling-time characteristics. The proposed strategy incorporates maximum turn-rate constraints without inducing singularities throughout the workspace. High-fidelity six-degree-of-freedom quadrotor simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of GLASS in representative enclosed inspection scenarios, highlighting a practically viable guidance framework for autonomous enclosed inspection missions.