Guidance and control system design for an aerial robot based on reference trajectory acceleration

In this paper, the guidance and control system of an aerial robot for tracking a reference trajectory is designed. The proposed algorithm uses the tracking errors to derive the guidance commands. These errors are in the form of acceleration command along inertial coordinate and the obtained commands are mapped to body fixed coordinated system. Then, using a new analytical approach the commands are converted to suitable inputs for the control system in the form of linear velocity, roll and pith angles. The proposed approach does not use the polar conversion, which in turn does produce nonphysical singularity defects. In addition, the aerodynamic and performance capability of aerial robots and corresponding limitations are considered. Using an aerial robot model with six-DOF, a control system is designed to track the designated guidance commands. Simulation results of a fixed wing aerial robot using six-DOF model reveal that the proposed guidance and control approaches significantly follow the guidance commands. In fact, the aerial robot tracks the desired trajectory with much higher accuracy than previous methods.