Unmanned air vehicles for targeting tasks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle in surveillance and reconnaissance operations are well known with its flight operations confining to the lateral and longitudinal plane where the altitude is maintained constant. The objective in these operations is to have a wide field of view when camera is mounted underneath the aircraft. However, in obstacle detection algorithms as well as in weapon-target assignments by an unmanned combat air vehicle, the sensors such as cameras and radars are mounted along the X direction of the body fixed frame. The unmanned vehicles with such sensor locations are expected to offer obstacle-camera and weapon-target line-of-sight engagements. These operations by the unmanned vehicles are referred as targeting tasks. In this paper, a procedure to use unmanned vehicles as targeting systems in pitch plane is presented with respect to a fixed order controller at the inner loop. The remote pilot's inputs at the outer loop is disengaged and to mimic these inputs, various flight path angles are scheduled thus depicting autonomous characteristics. Illustrations to depict targeting tasks are provided.