Coverage-based three-dimensional cooperative guidance strategy against highly maneuvering target

Abstract A coverage-based cooperative guidance strategy is proposed for multiple missiles to cooperatively intercept a highly maneuvering target. The scenario of interest is that several missiles separate with each other to cooperatively intercept the target at the beginning of terminal guidance phase, and both the interceptors and target are assumed to have limited maneuverability. The guidance goal is formulated to cooperatively cover the target evasion region by coordinating the reachable sets of different interceptors. To achieve this goal, firstly, the concept of virtual aiming points is introduced to bias the reachable set of true proportional navigation guidance law (TPN) as expected. Then, to maximally cover the target maneuvering range, we transform the cooperation problem into an optimization problem to find a set of proper virtual aiming points for different missiles. The main advantage of the proposed guidance strategy is that it enables multiple missiles without maneuverability superiority to intercept a highly maneuvering target. Numerical simulations clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative strategy.