Integrated design of trajectory planning and control for micro air vehicles

Effective trajectory planning and feedback control are important for an autonomous micro air vehicle (MAV) to accomplish a flight task of going across several target points. This paper presents a novel method to generate an optimal trajectory for a MAV based on criteria of minimum energy consumptions and lowest difficulties in reorienting the vehicle, via designing feasible turning rates and heading angles in consideration of the MAV dynamics. A switching PID feedback control is proposed and utilized in the lateral control of the MAV to accomplish the trajectory tracking. Examples of two-waypoint and multi-waypoint missions, using the proposed trajectory planning and tracking scheme based on a developed control system of a MAV, are presented, with the simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.