Model Predictive Static Programming Rendezvous Trajectory Generation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of threedimensional rendezvous trajectory generation for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. A time control method is developed based on the model predictive static programming which features explicit closed-form solutions and terminal output constraints. In addition to the terminal output constraints, a time-varying weighting matrix is designed in the cost function to enforce the terminal bank angle of aircraft. A two-step strategy is proposed where the first step determines feasible trajectories for every agent to pursuit a maneuvering virtual target and the second step achieves time coordination and synchronizations of position, velocity and bank angle among vehicles. Considering the nonlinear aircraft dynamics and first order input lags, numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.