Cooperative Salvo Based Active Aircraft Defense Using Impact Time Guidance

Abstract

This letter proposes fixed-time convergent cooperative guidance strategy for target-defender team against the incoming threat of an attacker. The target lures the attacker on a collision course by nullifying its line-of-sight rate with respect to the attacker, thereby presenting itself as a bait. At each instant, the target also sends the information of estimated time-to-go of attacker-target engagement to a single defender (swarm leader), which further shares this information with a subset of other defenders. On the collision course, the attacker is likely to become non-maneuvering. The defenders thus simultaneously capture the attacker with reduced maneuverability, before attacker reaches within a vicinity of the target. Efficacy and applicability of the proposed cooperative scheme is demonstrated via numerical simulations.