Sliding mode-based pure pursuit guidance for unmanned aerial vehicle rendezvous and chase with a cooperative aircraft

This article introduces a high-performance pure pursuit guidance method via sliding mode approach for an unmanned aerial vehicle's (UAV) rendezvous with a cooperative aircraft. A guidance method for rendezvous should orient the UAV to a predicted rendezvous position and a specified heading constraint that enables the UAV to continue to follow a cooperative aircraft at a desired distance. For the guidance scheme to accomplish these objectives, a chosen waypoint is used to guide the UAV to a rendezvous point with an allowable heading error. Furthermore, the UAV has to reach the proposed rendezvous point at an admissible time of arrival and has to have the aircraft's velocity. To this end, a dynamic inversion (DI)-based velocity controller is introduced. The proposed pure pursuit guidance, in conjunction with a waypoint setting methodology and the DI-based velocity controller are discussed in this article. Some simulation results are also provided to demonstrate and analyse the performance of the proposed scheme.