Path following for air vehicles in coordinated flight

We address the problem of following a path in space with a wheeled or an air vehicle in coordinated flight. The problem is approached as a constrained approximation of the desired path with feasible trajectories of the vehicle. The result is a predictive, linear output feedback which stabilizes the vehicle about the target contour. The original contributions include: 1) a thorough stability analysis of the path following control law with a full characterization of the convergence properties in terms of the parameters of the controller; 2) the generalization to dynamical models; and 3) the application to the control of a helicopter in coordinated flight