Dr. Sikha Hota

Lyapunov Vector Field Based Guidance and Control for Unmanned Vehicles

These days unmanned vehicles are economical and efficient solutions to many civilian, industrial and military challenges especially dull, dirty and dangerous missions e.g search and rescue operations, forest fire monitoring, border surveillance, power line inspection, package transport, crop monitoring, traffic management, mass gathering management, disaster management and many more. 

Active research is going on to meet the challenges in using unmanned vehicles effectively; one of them is to include autonomy in unmanned systems. Path generation, path following, target tracking and obstacle avoidance are the fundamental requirement for the autonomy. A wide variety of g uidance vector field-based algorithms for unmanned vehicles are existing to fulfill these fundamental requirements towards autonomous flight . In this talk Lyapunov guidance vector field framework will be discussed to address several path planning problems .

Typical hierarchical architecture of path following controller is followed here, which consists of outer loop (guidance) and inner-loop controllers. The guidance loop generates the desired transnational velocities, which should be followed by the inner-loop controller by generating the required lateral acceleration profile. This guidance law developed here is a function of the minimum turn radius of curvature, and hence it is applicable for different maneuverable vehicles A lso the guidance law generates paths of continuous curvature to make it flyable by fixed-wing unmanned vehicles or nonholonomic ground robots. Simulation results will also be discussed to experience the efficacy of the guidance law.