Geometric Guidance for Enclosing Moving Targets
Saurabh Kumar, Shashi Ranjan Kumar, Abhinav Sinha · 2025
This paper addresses the target circumnavigation problem of unmanned aerial vehicles in the presence of limited information. We present a nonlinear guidance strategy for the unmanned aerial vehicle that steers it to circumnavigate around a target, which can be either moving or stationary. Furthermore, the proposed guidance strategy only relies on the relative measurements, which can be obtained through some low-cost sensors. This is unlike the previous strategies that were primarily applicable to stationary targets or strategies that require absolute measurements for circumnavigation. As a consequence, the proposed approach is more generic and removes the dependency of the controller upon the target's mobility while minimizing the sensing hardware. The proposed strategy can be more suitable for environments where absolute measurements are not available or are difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the proposed strategy is expected to reduce the onboard computational burden as it only requires limited information. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and merits of our design via numerical simulations.