Three-dimensional Optimal Path-Point Following Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This article investigates the problem of UAV tracking three-dimensional trajectory and an optimal guidance law is proposed to guarantee minimum energy consumption. Based on optimal control theory, we first derive two-dimensional optimal path-point tracking guidance law. Then, the guidance approach is extended to three-dimensional for real application. The proposed method first calculates feature points of the pre-designated trajectory, and then guides the UAV to sequentially pass feature points to track the expected trajectory. The energy optimization can be proved by theoretical analysis and the numerical simulation results also indicate that the pro-posed method is feasible.