Optimal reference tracking with arbitrary sampling

It is a standard engineering practice to design feedback-based control to have a system follow a given trajectory. While the trajectory is continuous-time, the sequence of references is varied at discrete times, which may not be periodic. In this paper, we propose a method to determine the discrete-time references which minimizes a weighted L2 distance between the achieved trajectory and the target trajectory. Also, we consider any arbitrary sequence of sampling instants. The proposed method is then assessed over different simulation results, analyzing the design parameters’ effects, and over an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) use case.