An integrated cooperative guidance design for target assignment and simultaneous attack on multiple targets

Abstract

This paper proposes an integrated cooperative guidance strategy for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles to simultaneously attack multiple targets. To solve the challenging cooperative attack problem coupled with the target assignment problem simultaneously in a unified one-phase framework, a novel auxiliary index denoted as the integrated relative distance is designed and analysed from two opposite perspectives. Because of its special properties, the proposed integrated relative distance plays a crucial role in evaluating dynamic engagement situations between attackers and targets, and it further provides a criterion for whether the cooperative attack mission is completed. Then all integrated relative distances are minimised to directly derive a cooperative guidance law for attackers based on optimal control theory. The simultaneous minimisation of integrated relative distances from both forward and backward perspectives ensures that each target is destroyed by at least one attacker and all attackers are fully exploited to obtain optimal attack performance. By this means, the target assignment problem is automatically solved and the cooperative simultaneous attack is achieved. Several simulation cases are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated cooperative guidance strategy.