Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of control and guidance laws for quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to track maneuvering ground targets. Proportional Derivative (PD) control law is a popular choice to be used as a tracking controller for quadrotors, but it is often inefficient due to practical acceleration constraints and a number of parameters that need to be tuned. The paper proposes a Proportional Navigation (PN)-based switching strategy to address the problem of mobile target tracking. The experiments and numerical simulations performed using nonmaneuvering and maneuvering targets show that the proposed PN-based switching strategy not only carries out effective tracking but also results into smaller oscillations and errors when compared to the widely used PD tracking method. The proposed PN-based switching strategy presents an important question with regard to when the switching should happen that would minimize the positional error between the UAV and the target. An optimal switching strategy, which is based on the analytical solutions of the PN and PD methods, is proposed. The numerical simulations not only validate the theoretical results with regard to the optimality of the proposed method for both nonmaneuvering and maneuvering targets but also demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to measurement noise.

Real-Time Visual Tracking of Moving Targets Using a Low-Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with a 3-Axis Stabilized Gimbal System

“…The PN method improves the constant bearing approach to accommodate for target maneuver by accelerating the missile in a direction lateral to the LOS with magnitude proportional to the rate change of the LOS angle. There are different types of PN methods according to their different mathematical formulations and their performances have been analyzed in [60], when applied to guidance of a quadrotor.…”

Autonomous Landing of a Quadcopter on a High-Speed Ground Vehicle

“…For GV tracking by the MAV, we use a guidance strategy switching between a Proportional Navigation (PN) law [12,Chapter 5] for the approach phase and a PD controller for the landing phase, which is similar in spirit to the approach in [15]. The approach phase is characterized by a large distance between the MAV and the GV and the absence of visual data to localize the GV.…”

“…On the other hand, within close range of the target, PN becomes inefficient. To alleviate this problem, [15] proposes to switch from PN to a proportional-derivative (PD) controller.…”

Three-dimensional guidance and control for ground moving target tracking by a quadrotor

“…Engelhardt et al (7) employed a flatness-based approach to obtain linear input-output dynamics as well as feasible reference trajectories using a MPC in which the operator commands are translated to the camera motions. Tan et al (8) developed control and guidance laws for a quadrotor to track manoeuverable ground targets. In this reference, an optimal switching strategy is proposed, which is based on the analytic solutions of the proportional navigation and proportional derivative methods.…”