Airspeed Forward-Invariance for Unpowered Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866910163756122112 |
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| author | Tekaslan, Huseyin Emre Atkins, Ella M. |
| author_facet | Tekaslan, Huseyin Emre Atkins, Ella M. |
| contents | Autonomous fixed-wing flight is becoming a key capability in aerial robotics, enabling sensing, mobility, and contingency operations across both small-scale Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and large-scale Advanced Air Mobility. During unpowered operation in fixed-wing platforms, airspeed is regulated solely through potential-kinetic energy exchange, making airspeed dynamics highly sensitive to guidance commands, particularly under wind. This paper presents a viability-based airspeed protection for ground-referenced guidance in steady wind, where airspeed evolution depends explicitly on the commanded flight path angle. Leveraging Nagumo's tangency condition, we derive a closed-form, wind-dependent characterization of admissible guidance commands that guarantees forward invariance of a safe airspeed envelope. These conditions are embedded within an offline quadratic programming framework to certify airspeed-safe maneuver primitives for non-ascending flight at the guidance level. The approach is validated using a high-fidelity unpowered fixed-wing aircraft model on gliding trajectories formed by concatenating certified maneuver primitives, demonstrating strict airspeed boundedness. Future work will address unsteady wind fields and flight experiments. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22860 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Airspeed Forward-Invariance for Unpowered Fixed-Wing Aircraft Tekaslan, Huseyin Emre Atkins, Ella M. Robotics Systems and Control Autonomous fixed-wing flight is becoming a key capability in aerial robotics, enabling sensing, mobility, and contingency operations across both small-scale Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and large-scale Advanced Air Mobility. During unpowered operation in fixed-wing platforms, airspeed is regulated solely through potential-kinetic energy exchange, making airspeed dynamics highly sensitive to guidance commands, particularly under wind. This paper presents a viability-based airspeed protection for ground-referenced guidance in steady wind, where airspeed evolution depends explicitly on the commanded flight path angle. Leveraging Nagumo's tangency condition, we derive a closed-form, wind-dependent characterization of admissible guidance commands that guarantees forward invariance of a safe airspeed envelope. These conditions are embedded within an offline quadratic programming framework to certify airspeed-safe maneuver primitives for non-ascending flight at the guidance level. The approach is validated using a high-fidelity unpowered fixed-wing aircraft model on gliding trajectories formed by concatenating certified maneuver primitives, demonstrating strict airspeed boundedness. Future work will address unsteady wind fields and flight experiments. |
| title | Airspeed Forward-Invariance for Unpowered Fixed-Wing Aircraft |
| topic | Robotics Systems and Control |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22860 |