Design of Three-Dimensional Path Following Guidance Logic

Abstract

This paper presents a three-dimensional path following guidance logic. The proposed guidance logic is composed of the guidance law and the motion strategy of virtual target along the desired path. The guidance law makes a vehicle purse the virtual target, and the motion strategy explicitly specifies the motion of virtual target by introducing the concept of the projection point and the tangentially receding distance. The proposed logic is simple and efficient and yet provides precise path following. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance logic.

A Three-Dimensional Guidance Logic for Continuous Curvature Path Following

“…Typically, pursuit guidance (PG) law and its variants have been used in recent path-following studies with a moving virtual target concept, because PG can direct the vehicle along the line-of-sight (LOS) irrespective of the vehicle and target velocities [3,5]. However, in our previous work [24], the combined pure proportional navigation guidance (PPNG) and PG law was proposed as a path-following guidance law as in…”

“…The proposed strategy for specifying the motion of virtual target in our previous work [24] is simple and practical. In this strategy, a virtual target is proposed to be positioned on the tangent line at the point D with a tangentially receding distance R 0 ahead of that point as illustrated in Figure 3, where the point D is the nearest projection point of a vehicle position onto the desired path.…”

“…In this section, the strategy of [24] is extended to a general continuous curvature path, and the motion of virtual target is explicitly determined as a function of the geometry of the desired path and position and velocity vectors of a vehicle. It starts with a general continuous curvature path and moves on to special paths such as a straight-line path and a circular path.…”

“…However, some methods in this approach are still for the paths in planar motion and are only applicable to primitive paths and their combinations, and the position and velocity of virtual target on a general three-dimensional path are not easy to determine. Park [24] proposed a new path-following guidance logic composed of the guidance law and the motion strategy of the virtual target. The guidance law is the combined pure proportional navigation guidance (PPNG) and pursuit guidance (PG) law, and the motion strategy explicitly specifies the motion of virtual target by introducing the concept of the projection point and the tangentially receding distance.…”

“…In this paper, a new extended guidance logic is presented for a continuous curvature path following based on our previous work [24]. The proposed guidance logic is general in the sense that it can be applied to any continuous curvature path in a three-dimensional space and includes the guidance logic proposed in [24] as a special case. Yet, it allows conceptually easy and practical way to determine the position and velocity of virtual target even when the desired path is a complicated curve and provides precise path following.…”