Wide-Envelope Cooperative Guidance With Constrained Field-of-View and Varying Speed Against Maneuvering Targets

Cooperative guidance is a practical and challenging problem involving multiple coupling constraints, especially considering missile speed variation and target maneuvers. In this article, a wide-envelope cooperative guidance law is proposed for multiple speed-varying missiles with the field-of-view (FOV) constraint to simultaneously intercept a maneuvering target. First, the 3-D cooperative guidance problem is reformulated in a virtual coordinate frame to address the target maneuver. Next, a cooperative guidance law is developed based on the varying-gain proportional navigation guidance law, with an effective numerical algorithm predicting the time-to-go under time-varying speed. Then, the guidance law is modified by including a bias guidance term to satisfy the FOV constraint throughout the cooperative guidance. Since no linearized approximations are involved in the derivation, the resultant cooperative guidance law guarantees a wide launch envelope as well as high impact precision without actively adjusting missile speed. Extensive numerical simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the suggested results.