Path Following Guidance

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Overview

Path following guidance addresses the problem of designing control laws that steer an autonomous vehicle to converge to and travel along a desired geometric path, without a timing requirement. Unlike trajectory tracking, path following does not require the vehicle to be at a specific point at a specific time, making it more suitable for vehicles with bounded control inputs and under environmental disturbances.

My work in this area focuses on developing nonlinear guidance laws for UAVs and autonomous surface vessels to follow arbitrary 3D paths. Key contributions include handling bounded lateral acceleration constraints, robustness against wind disturbances, and providing formal convergence guarantees using Lyapunov-based analysis.

Key Contributions

  • Three-dimensional nonlinear path following guidance for UAVs with formal stability proofs.

  • Robust path following in the presence of wind and external disturbances.

  • Guidance designs that respect bounded control input constraints.

  • Generic path-following framework applicable to various vehicle models.

  • Extension to bounded lateral acceleration constraints for fixed-wing UAVs.

Relevant Publications

Journal Papers

  1. Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, and Abhinav Sinha, Three-dimensional Nonlinear Path-following Guidance with Bounded Input Constraints, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2026, pp. 198–215.

  2. Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, and Abhinav Sinha, Three-Dimensional Path Following Nonlinear Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, Vol. 47, No. 6, 2024, pp. 1231–1240.

  3. Saurabh Kumar, Abhinav Sinha, and Shashi Ranjan Kumar, Robust Path-following Guidance for an Autonomous Vehicle in the Presence of Wind, Aerospace Science and Technology, Vol. 150, 2024, pp. 109225.

  4. Vinay Kathiriya, Saurabh Kumar, and Shashi Ranjan Kumar, Path-Following Guidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Bounded Lateral Acceleration, ArXiv, 2026 (under review).

Conference Papers

  1. Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, and Abhinav Sinha, Path Following Guidance with Bounded Control, AIAA GNC Conference, Orlando, USA, 2026.

  2. Saurabh Kumar, Abhinav Sinha, and Shashi Ranjan Kumar, Generic Path-following Guidance for an Autonomous Vehicle, AIAA GNC Conference, Orlando, USA, 2024.

  3. Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, and Abhinav Sinha, Robust Path-following Guidance for an Unmanned Vehicle, AIAA GNC Conference, National Harbor, MD, USA, 2023.

  4. Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, and Abhinav Sinha, Separate Guidance and Control Design for Autonomous Path-following, IFAC-PapersOnLine, Vol. 55, No. 22, 2022, pp. 212–217.