Standoff tracking control of moving target in unknown wind

This paper considers the problem of standoff tracking control for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) where the UAV is used to track a moving target in unknown background wind. A new control approach combining the Lyapunov guidance vector field approach and a modified adaptive estimation strategy to estimate the velocities of unknown constant wind and unknown constant target motion is proposed. In the proposed approach, a variable heading rate controller based on the adaptive estimate is designed to achieve standoff tracking of moving target while the airspeed of the UAV can be specified to be constant. In addition, this proposed approach can be applied to perform standoff target tracking by using the UAV with an arbitrary initial heading. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.