Unmanned aerial vehicle standoff target tracking using modified reference point guidance

This paper proposes novel nonlinear control law of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for standoff target tracking by assuming the velocity of target is constant. The reference point guidance (RPG) is modified as the standoff distance control law of UAV, and a set of nonlinear equations depicts the transient behavior of relative distance between UAV and target is built to analyze the asymptotic stability of modified RPG, and the relationship between modified RPG parameter and system performance is derived. Finally, simulation results have verified that the proposed control laws have smaller tracking error and integrated time absolute error (ITAE) than Lyapunov vector field guidance (LVFG) and model-based predictive control (MPC). Thus the proposed methods have faster response speed and higher steady state accuracy.