UAV Guidance with Control of Arrival Time

This paper describes a method to control the arrival time of unmaned aerial vehicles (UAV) to selected targets. Each UAV has a guidance algorithm that uses a model predictive control scheme. The control criteria is the weighted sum of the distance between the preselected target and the UAV, the control effort and the time-to-go error. The time-to-go error is the difference between the time that would be required by the vehicle to reach the target without terminal time constraint (t_go), and a desired reaching time (c_go). A time-to-go estimation is obtained with the behaviour prediction scheme (BPS), which consists in applying an approximate replica of the UAV guidance algorithm to a virtual UAV in order to simulate the behaviour of the real UAV. The number of iterations that is required by the BPS to bring the virtual UAV to the target corresponds to t_go.