Airspeed Forward-Invariance for Unpowered Fixed-Wing Aircraft

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22860v1
• Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:43:07 GMT
• Title: Airspeed Forward-Invariance for Unpowered Fixed-Wing Aircraft
• Abstract summary: This paper presents a viability-based airspeed protection for ground-referenced guidance in steady wind.<n>We derive a closed-form, wind-dependent characterization of admissible guidance commands that guarantees forward invariance of a safe airspeed envelope.<n>The approach is validated using a high-fidelity unpowered fixed-wing aircraft model on gliding trajectories.
• Score: 5.173672380708639
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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