Range-only control for cooperative target circumnavigation of unmanned aerial vehicles

This article deals with cooperative target circumnavigation control strategy for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) when only range measurements are available. First, we propose novel guidance laws based solely on range measurements for tracking and cooperation. Then, convergence and stability of the proposed guidance laws are proved by a rigorous inference of mathematics. Moreover, an illustrative simulation shows that the controlled UAVs orbit around a target and maintain even spacing along the common circle, which confirms the performance of the proposed guidance algorithms. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd