Cooperative bicircular target tracking using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper investigates the problem of tracking a moving target using multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under a new bicircular formation. This new formation for cooperative standoff target tracking is first developed by maximizing the amount of Fisher information. Guidance vector fields are designed, and based on them, a cooperation approach is proposed to adapt the unknown target velocity and achieve the cooperative bicircular tracking. Speed and heading rate are firstly controlled to track the guidance vector fields separately for each UAV, then the speed is further adjusted to maintain the desired angular separation between the UAVs. Simulation experiments are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.