Differential Flatness Applied to Vehicle Trajectory Tracking

Abstract: Differential flatness, a property of some dynamic systems which has been recognized only recently, has made pos-sible the development of new tools to control complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Guidance dynamics of many different sys-tems have been recognized as being explicitly or implicitly differentially flat as it is the case for flight guidance dynamics of conventional aircraft. In this paper, a new control structure is proposed to achieve trajectory tracking for vehicles: a neural network deals with the inversion of nominal guidance dynamics while a linear corrector cope with modelling errors and per-turbations so that control directives to conventional autopilot systems can be generated in real time. The proposed approach is illustrated in the case of conventional aircraft flight dynamics