Observation-Shared Cooperative Look-Angle Tracking Guidance for Multiple Missiles With Partial Seekers

The cooperative guidance problem for heterogeneous missile groups, where only partial missiles have seekers, is investigated to realize a high-efficiency-cost simultaneous attack. First, a distributed observer is developed to share the observation among missiles such that the seeker-less missiles can estimate the guidance information at a prescribed time. Second, local flight speed ratio and line-of-sight (LOS) range ratio among neighboring missiles are introduced as the coordination variables to formulate the desired look-angle profile. Then, this profile is tracked at a prescribed time to ensure a simultaneous attack by the proposed cooperative guidance law. Stability and performance guarantees are proved by theoretical analysis. Unlike most existing results, the proposed result obviates the requirements for entirely equipped seekers and time-to-go estimation, thus possessing great potential significance. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to show the validation of the designed results even under missile speed variation.