Application of virtual target based guidance laws to path following of a quadrotor UAV

Two missile guidance laws viz. Pursuit Guidance (PG) and Trajectory Shaping (TS), have been adopted to aggressively follow curved, compact trajectories using a quadrotor. The concept of virtual target navigation has been utilized to generate the required curved trajectories. Simulations and flight tests have been performed using a quadrotor and the performance characteristics obtained have been compared with those obtained from Differential Flatness (DF) approach. The various simulation and flight results prove that TS generates smaller position errors and requires lower control effort in comparison to PG and DF.