Abstract
This paper focuses on autonomous path-following flight taking uncertainty and external disturbances into account. Integrated guidance and autopilot are developed using a second-order sliding mode approach that is one of the well-known approaches for mitigating so-called ‘chattering phenomena’. The input magnitude for such a higher-order sliding mode approach tends to be extremely large in the initial reaching phase. In this paper, a novel sliding surface is developed using Ackermann and Utkin's method for reaching the surface smoothly to attenuate such extremely large initial inputs along with uncertainty and disturbance compensation. The potential of the proposed methodology is demonstrated with some path-following application under wind turbulence. Performance comparison with a conventional higher-order sliding mode approach is also presented.
