Guidance of an Autonomous Agent for Coverage Applications using Range Only Measurement
Twinkle Tripathy, Arpita Sinha · AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Conference · 2013
This paper addresses the problem of guiding an autonomous agent to cover a region surrounding a target. It is assumed that only range information is available to the agent. The target point is considered to be stationary. The region of interest can be changed by changing the initial conditions or the system parameters. In this work, we analyse the effect of the initial conditions only. We propose a simple control law which can be easily implemented. The analytical results obtained here are validated through simulation. The autonomous agent could be a ground or an aerial vehicle depending on the application. For surveillance applications, the target can be a landmark, where the agent can monitor the region surrounding the landmark. Other applications can be sprinkling fertilizers, watering a farm, etc. where a pre-defined area needs to be covered. I.