Rodrigues, Luis (Concordia University), Rezaee Qotb Abadi, Mahmood (Concordia University)

Verhulst-based Observer for Vehicle Waypoint Navigation in 3D

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Navigation" (WeBA), Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 14:40−15:00, Auditorium

33rd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, June 10-13, 2025, Tangier, Morocco

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on May 9, 2025

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel nonlinear observer to estimate the position of a flying vehicle in waypoint navigation using quadratic measurements. The quadratic measurements are the squared distance to a point source located at the origin. It is shown that the dynamics of the estimation error are described by a nonlinear Verhulst logistc equation. This observation unveils a link between navigation of a vehicle using squared range measurements and population dynamics, which to the best of the authors' knowledge is new. The convergence of the state estimate is studied for 3D motion. Straight and helical paths are studied and conditions for stability of the error dynamics are formulated. Simulations show the peformance of the nonlinear observer.