A guidance law that enables a coordinated surveillance and target acquisition is proposed to make multiple fixed-wing aircraft circle around a moving target while maintaining a specific distance from it with a desired circling rate. The stabilization of a spherical pendulum to a conical motion is applied to the aircraft motion in order to obtain the standoff tracking guidance law. Aircraft acceleration commands are designed to regulate the errors between the current position and the desired position using the Lyapunov stability theory and backstepping scheme. The coordinated standoff tracking with multiple aircraft is accomplished by applying the proposed guidance law to the leader-follower formation. Numerical simulation was performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Multiple aircraft are successfully guided to a circular motion around a moving target while maintaining tight spatial phase spacing to the neighboring aircraft.
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