Abstract
This project deals with tracking and navigation methods for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Tracking, navigation, and online flight path control are essential for any application employing UAVs. Issues such as optimal flight path and obstacle avoidance are also important for the deployment of UAVs in real world applications. This project employs plane decomposition and kinematics-based rules to derive linear navigation control laws. These control laws depend on navigation parameters such as proportionality and deviation factors used to guide the UAV to successfully reach a moving goal following a non linear path. Two modes of UAV motion are presented in the project: 1) Surveillance mode in which a UAV follows a moving goal in a three dimensional space and eventually reaches it with the help of the navigation law. 2) Obstacle avoidance mode in which the UAV maneuvers around the obstacles in its flight path and reaches the moving goal with the help of the navigation law. Through simulation, it is shown that the navigation laws used in this project derived based on kinematics rules are adequate for successful implementation of the tracking and navigation of the UAV, allowing the vehicle to reach an arbitrary goal moving with nonlinear maneuvers.