Aircraft Defense Differential Game with Non-Zero Capture Radius

Abstract

An aircraft defense differential game is analyzed where a Target aircraft and a Defender missile team up to defeat an Attacker missile. The Attacker pursues the (slower) Target which evades the Attacker with the help of the Defender, which is endowed with a non-zero capture radius. The Target and the Defender cooperate in a way that the Defender intercepts the Attacker before the latter reaches the Target. The payoff functional is the distance between the Target and the Attacker at the interception time which the Attacker strives to minimize and the Target/Defender team strives to maximize. The work in this paper generalizes existing results to consider a non-zero capture radius as opposed to the limiting case of point capture.