Constrained Moving Path Following Control for UAV With Robust Control Barrier Function

The vehicle is required to converge to a reference path moving with respect to the inertial frame, while the path following error is not expected to violate the predefined boundaries. First, we formulat the moving path following problem into a second-order time-varying control problem.

Second, a nominal moving path following guidance law is designed with disturbances and their derivatives estimated by high-order disturbance observers. Then, a robust control barrier function is developed and incorporated into controller design with quadratic program based framework. The proposed guidance law is validated through numerical simulations of shipboard landing and hardware-inthe-loop (HIL) experiments.