Robust Cooperative Capture of Maneuvering Targets by Multiple UAVs Based on Direction-Only Measurement Estimation

Abstract

This paper investigates robust cooperative capture of a maneuvering target by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under noisy bearing-only measurements and intermittent perception outliers. A closed-loop framework is developed by integrating temporal-consistency-based outlier rejection, projection-residual-based distributed estimation, consensus fusion, and cooperative control. Historical bearing variations are used to identify abrupt outliers without contaminating the sliding window, while effective multi-UAV bearings are fused to obtain consistent target-position estimates. A control law combining target approach and formation cohesion is then designed. For the nominal case without explicit communication delay, the closed-loop errors are shown to be uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) under bounded disturbances, connected communication, nondegenerate bearing geometry, and suitable gain conditions. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a favorable trade-off between estimation accuracy, inter-UAV consistency, outlier robustness, and cooperative capture performance.