Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Guidance for an All-Aspect Approach to a Stationary Point

This paper offers an integrated framework enabling planar and spatial guidance for a fixed-wing aerial vehicle to approach a stationary point from any direction. Specifically, it elaborates on the standard and two-stage pure proportional navigation guidance laws developed earlier and proposes an integrated multiphase planar guidance scheme for the all-aspect approach while also accounting for an onboard seeker's field-of-view limitation. This scheme is further extended to a two-plane-segregated two-planar-phase guidance scheme for achieving any terminal approach vector at a stationary point in three-dimensional space. The developed algorithms are evaluated in computer and software-in-the-loop simulations involving a model of a small unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a commercial-off-the-shelf autopilot.