Autonomous homing in 3D using partial state feedback on a novel sliding surface

Reaching the home position especially when it is not described using coordinates, is an important task in many autonomous robotic applications. This work investigates the aforementioned autonomous homing problem with the design goal of applying in small size robot, which has sensing and processing constraints, along with robust controller design. The novelty in the work attributes to the proposed sliding surfaces, one for yaw-control and the other one for pitch-control, whose intersection aligns the robot's orientation towards the home position irrespective of the robot's location. Finite time convergence to the sliding surface with partial state feedback is proved with the help of Lyapunov analysis. Further, the reduced order dynamics is analyzed to show the convergence of the robot to the vicinity of home position within a threshold distance. Simulation in Matlab verify performance of proposed control law in the presence of matched disturbances.