Automatic Control for Chase Aircraft

Many kinds of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been developed for a few decades and some of them are now in operational use. Although each UAV as well as a piloted aircraft might have restrictions to execute some tasks simultaneously or to carry some payloads, one with an automatic chase aircraft might have the potential of multi-capabilities to conduct a variety of missions or to carry more storages. This paper introduces a chase UAV control system to enhance a leader (reference) aircraft capability which has storage restriction. The automatic chase guidance and control system will be introduced with the pure pursuit guidance law combined with relative velocity error corrections, and a dynamic inversion technique in order to generate the guidance forces.