A streamlined nonlinear path following kinematic controller

Abstract

This paper presents a new nonlinear path-following guidance method for autonomous vehicles, which integrates two guidance laws that have given good results independently in applications in autonomous ground, marine, and air vehicles. This new technique retains the best aspects of its two supporting methods, whereas it overcomes some of their drawbacks. It uses the control law by Park et al. to command the vehicle position towards a reference point. However, the position of the reference point is controlled in a different way: instead of being calculated to stay at a fixed distance forward of the vehicle, we use a strategy, inspired in the works by other authors, that controls the speed of the reference point to maintain its position at the given distance. This change does not increment the number of parameters to tune the algorithm and makes it applicable to any initial conditions and parameterized paths. The paper also analyzes the stability of this new nonlinear guidance control law and shows its effectiveness under different simulations.