Three-Dimensional Cooperative Enclosing Guidance Law with Circling Plane Constraint

This paper presents a three-dimensional cooperative enclosing guidance law to steer a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enclose a target within a specified plane with desired angular intervals. The guidance process consists of two stages: the plane pursuit stage and the coplanar cooperative stage. In the first stage, a circling-plane-constrained enclosing guidance (CPCEG) law is developed to control UAVs to circle the target in the specified circling plane. The CPCEG law contains an encircling guidance command for steering UAVs to circle the target and a plane pursuit command based on sliding mode theory for driving UAVs to reach the specified plane. In the second stage, a cooperative enclosing speed controller is designed based on the phase angle kinematics within the circling plane and allows the UAVs to enclose the target with desired angular intervals between each other. The stability of the proposed system is theoretically proven, and various numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.