Moving Path Following for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Applications to Single and Multiple Target Tracking Problems

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2016

Authors

Oliveira, T (Author) Other; Aguiar, AP (Author) FEUP; Encarnacao, P (Author) Other

Journal

Title: IEEE Transactions on Robotics

Vol. 32

Pages: 1062-1078

ISSN: 1552-3098

Publisher: IEEE

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 42 Citations

Scopus - 53 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00K-VS8

DOI: 10.1109/tro.2016.2593044

Abstract (EN): This paper introduces the moving path following (MPF) problem, in which a vehicle is required to converge to and follow a desired geometric moving path, without a specific temporal specification, thus generalizing the classical path following that only applies to stationary paths. Possible tasks that can be formulated as an MPF problem include tracking terrain/air vehicles and gas clouds monitoring, where the velocity of the target vehicle or cloud specifies the motion of the desired path. We derive an error space for MPF for the general case of time-varying paths in a two-dimensional space and subsequently an application is described for the problem of tracking single and multiple targets on the ground using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying at constant altitude. To this end, a Lyapunov-based MPF control law and a path-generation algorithm are proposed together with convergence and performance metric results. Real-world flight tests results that took place in Ota Air Base, Portugal, with the ANTEX-X02 UAV demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 17