In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen large scale adoption in
different civilian and public safety applications. Such applications necessitate the UAV
to autonomously follow a predefined path. Lots of path-following guidance methods
have been developed for UAVs. Most of the existing guidance methods are restrictive in
attaining faster convergence and also necessitating infeasible high turn rate command
for several scenarios. The guidance algorithms are not applicable to generalized desired
paths and are limited to 2-D applications. The goal of my research would be focused
on developing a novel guidance scheme for the autonomous tracking of generalized
reference paths by UAVs. It is intended for the scheme to be simple in its formulation
and easily implementable for the general class of UAVs without compromising on
tracking performance. The output guidance command would be in the form of a lateral
acceleration command to steer the UAV for smooth convergence to the reference path,
while maintaining the nominal speed. And we should be able to implement the developed
scheme in real-world applications in the presence of any other kind of disturbance.