Extending Guiding Vector Field to track unbounded UAV paths

A recent advance in vector field path following is the introduction of the Parametric Guiding Vector Field method. It allows for singularity-free vector fields with strong convergence guarantees, usable even for self-intersecting paths. However, the method requires significant gain tuning for practical use. In particular, for unbounded paths, the gains will inevitably become ill-suited for efficient path following. We propose a method to overcome this issue by introducing a dynamic step adaptation strategy, which provides additional normalization properties to the field. This allows the following of unbounded curves and reduces the number of gains to tune. The proposed improvements are verified in simulations using the PaparazziUAV software.