Lateral Guidance of the Small Scale Research Vehicle by Model Predictive Control

—Flight Test Results of Straight Trajectory Tracking—

Abstract

This paper describes the novel lateral guidance law of an unmanned aerial vehicle using model predictive control and shows its flight demonstration results. The guidance law is accompanied with the extended Kalman filter which estimates steady wind velocities in order to follow a pre-specified reference trajectory defined in the ground-fixed coordinate system. The small scale research vehicle, developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is used to show the proposed system's high guidance performance in flight demonstrations.