Ground target tracking and collision avoidance for UAV based guidance Vector Field

This paper focuses on ground moving target tracking of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in existence of static obstacles and moving threat sources. Due to UAV subject to airspace restriction and measurement limitations during the flight, we derived a dynamic path planning strategy by generating guidance filed combined with Lyapunov Vector Field and collision avoidance potential function to track target with stand-off distance by circle loitering pattern, and resolved collision avoidance, simultaneously. We verified the tracking and collision avoidance process of UAV with numeric simulations at the presence of obstacles and threat sources, and were able to get better results. This method relies only on the current information of UAV and target, and generates single-step route plan in real time, it has performance of simple, efficient, fast and low computational complexity.