Consensus Cooperative Encirclement Interception Guidance Law for Multiple Vehicles against Maneuvering Target

Abstract

This paper studies a cooperative encirclement interception guidance law against a maneuvering target that utilizes a leader–follower control scheme. The control design is decoupled into two parts. In the line-of-sight (LOS) direction, a fixed-time distributed disturbance observer is presented to estimate the maneuvering of the target. Based on the proposed disturbance observer, the guidance law is designed for the followers to guarantee that each follower’s total flight time achieves consensus with that of the leader. In the normal direction of the LOS, the control command is designed to realize the encirclement interception with a predefined-time consensus protocol. The convergence of the guidance algorithm is proven by the Lyapunov stability theory. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed cooperative-guidance law.