Capturability of a simple guidance law with angular acceleration input

This paper examines the capturability of a guidance law that provides a desired angular acceleration of the heading angle to a pursuer. The guidance law has originally been proposed by Fajen and Warren[13], in order to explain the behavior of walking humans. It is shown that the relative rotational motion between a pursuer and an evader can be represented by an equation similar to the equation of motion for a pendulum with a disturbance. A set of sufficient conditions for successful pursuit are derived, and it is proved that the gain parameters of the guidance law can be chosen so that the conditions are satisfied. For sufficiently large gains, a pursuer controlled by the guidance law catches a maneuvering evader while achieving motion camouflage.