Higher-order sliding mode based lateral guidance for unmanned aerial vehicles

A nonlinear sliding mode based scheme is developed for lateral guidance of unmanned aerial vehicles. The guidance and control system is considered as an inner and outer loop design problem, the outer guidance loop generates commands for the inner control loop to follow. Control loop dynamics is considered during derivation of the guidance logic, along with saturation constraints on the guidance commands. A nonlinear sliding manifold is selected for guidance logic design, the guidance loop generates bank angle commands for the inner roll control loop to follow. The real twisting algorithm, a higher order sliding mode algorithm is used for guidance logic design. Existence of the sliding mode along with boundedness of the guidance command is proved to ensure that controls are not saturated for large track errors. The proposed logic also contains an element of anticipatory or feed-forward control, which enables tight tracking for sharply curving paths. Efficacy of the proposed method is verified by flight testing on a scaled YAK-54 unmanned aerial vehicle. Flight results demonstrate robustness and effectiveness of the proposed guidance scheme in the presence of disturbances.