Cooperative Guidance and Target Assignment for a Heterogeneous Interceptor Team

In multi-target, multi-interceptor engagements cooperation between the group members can be exploited to benefit from synergetic effects on the overall intercept performance. The main challenge associated with such a scenario is the high dimensionality of the combined problem of target assignment policy and trajectory design. Thus, dimensionality reduction is essential for providing a real-time scalable solution. A viable way to address this challenge is to introduce an assignment-aware guidance framework, which simultaneously allows for imposing the required intercept constraints and providing the necessary performance measures as feedback for the assignment algorithm.

As a basis for the assignment-aware guidance framework, we introduce guidance laws for impact-time and impact-time-and-angle control based on a quadratic kinematics approximation of the original interceptor kinematic model. In contrast to common linearization methods, the proposed approach allows full integration of the guidance with the assignment process. Namely, the assignment algorithm can select suitable targets and exploit impact time and geometry coupling to coordinate the group intercept strategy. At the same time, the proposed model provides guidance performance prediction of each engagement with sufficient accuracy to be further optimized by the assignment algorithm.

To extend the application of the proposed guidance framework to the case of significant variations in the interceptor speed, we propose a computationally efficient numerical trajectory design based on the parameter continuation procedure. We show that the semi-analytical solution of the approximate quadratic kinematics problem provides a viable initial guess for the numerical method and facilitates convergence.

Finally, to account for the guidance limitations of the existing interceptors, we investigate the optimal emulation of advanced guidance laws on proportional-navigation-guided interceptors. We show that by intelligently selecting the sequence of virtual targets, the reference guidance law trajectory can be reproduced almost exactly.

The work is towards PhD degree under the supervision of Tal Shima, Professor, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Technion & Martin Weiss, Research Scientist, Rafael Ltd.