A Path-Following Guidance Method for Nonholonomic Vehicles with a Large Domain of Attraction for Straight and Curved Paths

Path-following control is an alternative technique to trajectory tracking, with superior performance characteristics when applied to a class of nonholonomic systems, especially relevant in the case of unmanned vehicles. In this work, we study a variant of a well-known guidance logic path-following control and analyze its stability. In particular, we show that the studied method not only maintains the stabilizing properties in a neighborhood of the path, but significantly enlarges the domain of attraction of the control law, both when following a straight or a curved nath.