Disturbance-Resilient Path-Following for Unmanned Airships via Curvature-Aware LOS Guidance and Super-Twisting Terminal Sliding-Mode Control

Unmanned airships are highly sensitive to parametric uncertainty, persistent wind disturbances, and sensor noise, all of which compromise reliable path-following. Classical control schemes often suffer from chattering and fail to handle index discontinuities on closed-loop paths due to the lack of mechanisms and cannot simultaneously provide formal guarantees on state constraint satisfaction. We address these challenges by developing a unified, constraint-aware guidance and control framework for path-following in uncertain environments. The architecture integrates an extended state observer (ESO) to estimate and compensate lumped disturbances, a barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) to enforce state constraints on tracking errors, and a super-twisting terminal sliding-mode (ST-TSMC) control law to achieve finite-time convergence with continuous, low-chatter control inputs. A constructive Lyapunov-based synthesis is presented to derive the control law and to prove that all tracking errors remain within prescribed error bounds. At the guidance level, a nonlinear curvature-aware line-of-sight (CALOS) strategy with an index-increment mechanism mitigates jump phenomena at loop-closure and segment-transition points on closed yet discontinuous paths. The overall framework is evaluated against representative baseline methods under combined wind and parametric perturbations. Numerical results indicate improved path-following accuracy, smoother control signals, and strict enforcement of state constraints, yielding a disturbance-resilient path-following solution for the cruise of an unmanned airship.