On trackability of a moving target by fixed-wing UAV using geometric approach

This paper addresses the trackability for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to track a dynamic target. To achieve the tracking task, the UAV needs to fulfill two objectives, i.e., keep synchronous motion with the target, and minimize the relative distance between itself and the target. Thus, to ensure the successful path planning, the UAV dynamics and sensor coverage range must be taken into consideration. By adoption of a geometric approach, systematic path planning algorithms are developed based on the ratios between the speeds of UAV and moving target. Meanwhile, a sufficient condition on sensor range is derived for the target to be non-escape from the UAV field of view (FOV). Finally, an application example is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the developed algorithms.