ABSTRACT
Decomposition of the unmanned aerial vehicles motion into two partslongitudinal (radial, axial) and lateral (orthogonal, tangential) motionsenables us to examine these components of motion separately. Watching how predators pursue their victims, one can conclude that they almost never direct themselves at the target. Only in the case of a nonmaneuvering target moving along the line-of-sight, there is no lateral motion and we have pure longitudinal motion. The so-called pure pursuit guidance geometric rule requires the pursuer to be directed at the target. This type of guidance has another name: hound-hare pursuit. Its origin is in the note by Dubois-Aymè published in 1811, in which he formulated and solved the intercept problem based on analysis of the traces left by his dog when chasing him on the beach. However, a dog in this case cannot be considered as a predator and this fact can explain low accuracy of the –rst generation of guided weapons starting from World War II that used the pure pursuit rule. Moreover, when aircraft pilots applied this rule, they actually executed the so-called lead pursuit by pointing the –ghter’s guns at a certain angle ahead of the target (lead means in the direction of the future target’s position), i.e., the weapon trajectory also contained a lateral component.
