Tilted Circumnavigation of Multiple Drones Around Multiple Targets

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach for coordinating a group of drones to follow a moving circular path while maintaining a specified distance between them. Unlike existing methods, which track an ellipse around multiple targets, the proposed approach defines a tilted circle in the air, whose projection becomes the enclosing ellipse on the ground. This allows drones to track the circle at a constant velocity while adjusting their altitude, avoiding collisions with each other. A vector-field guidance law followed by an integral sliding-mode control is designed to ensure that drones meet three conditions under bounded disturbances: reaching the plane of the tilted circle, turning around its center with a time-varying radius, and avoiding collisions. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in real-life scenarios. © 2023 ICROS.