A guidance law is presented to enable a coordinated standoff tracking of a moving target with multiple fixed-wing unmanned aircraft. The standoff tracking guidance law makes multiple aircraft circle around a moving target while maintaining a specific distance from it with a desired circling rate. The stabilization of a spherical pendulum to a conical motion is applied to the aircraft motion to obtain the standoff tracking guidance commands. The acceleration commands are designed to regulate the position and velocity errors using the Lyapunov stability theory and the backstepping technique. The coordinated standoff tracking with multiple aircraft is achieved by applying the proposed guidance law to a leader-follower formation. The only information transmitted from the leader aircraft to the follower aircraft is the phase angle of the leader. In addition an offset circle is proposed to deal with the aircraft speed limit. Tight phase spacing between the neighboring aircraft is accomplished by tracking the reference position and velocity vectors defined on the offset circle. Numerical simulations and flight tests are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Multiple aircraft are successfully guided to a circular motion around the moving target while maintaining tight phase spacing to the neighboring aircraft as well as a desired standoff distance to the target.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Circular Motion Guidance Law for Coordinated Standoff Tracking of a Moving Target


    Contributors:
    Seungho Yoon (author) / Sanghyuk Park (author) / Youdan Kim (author)


    Publication date :

    2013-10-01


    Size :

    8997046 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Coordinated Standoff Tracking of Moving Targets Using Lyapunov Guidance Vector Fields

    Frew, Eric W. / Lawrence, Dale A. / Morris, Steve | AIAA | 2008



    Coordinated standoff tracking of moving target groups using multiple UAVs

    Hyondong Oh / Seungkeun Kim / Hyo-sang Shin et al. | IEEE | 2015

    Free access

    Vector field guidance for standoff target tracking

    Harinarayana, Tammineni / Hota, Sikha / Kushwaha, Rahul | SAGE Publications | 2022