Cooperative Guidance for Simultaneous Interception Using Multiple Sliding Surfaces

A cooperative guidance strategy is developed to force multiple pursuers to intercept a target simultaneously. The guidance law works to minimize the time-to-go difference between neighboring pursuers while still keeping them on track for interception. The guidance law is derived using sliding mode control, with one sliding surface for every pair of neighboring pursuers to remove time-to-go difference and one global sliding surface to make sure at least one pursuer is heading towards the target, guaranteeing the others’ interception as well. A time-to-go approximation scheme for a stationary target is used during the derivation. In addition, the guidance law is expanded to a moving target using a predicted interception point approximation scheme. A two-dimensional nonlinear simulation of the relative kinematics is run for cases of both two pursuers and more, as well as a moving target, in which the guidance law is shown to successfully cause simultaneous interception between multiple pursuers starting from different initial conditions.

The work is towards M.Sc. degree under the supervision of Prof. Tal Shima, Aerospace Engineering, Technion– Israel Institute of Technology.