Guidance and control for cooperative search

We consider the problem of searching a wide area in a systematic fashion until a target is found and confirmed. The search is accomplished with multiple vehicles. Our approach considers motion in the horizontal plane but subject to atmospheric and other disturbances. The vehicles cooperate in that the total path length covered by the vehicles is minimized while exhaustively searching the area and performing a second sighting of potential targets. We illustrate the cooperative search with several examples that show the versatility of the algorithm.