Cooperative Target Capture in 3D Engagements over Switched Dynamic Graphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a leaderless cooperative guidance strategy for 3D target interception using switched dynamic graphs, focusing on lateral acceleration control and robustness to uncertainties, with proven consensus guarantees.

Contribution

It presents a novel cooperative guidance approach that handles coupled 3D engagements, models uncertainties, and guarantees time-to-go consensus without radial acceleration.

Findings

Guidance commands ensure time-to-go consensus within a preset time.

Strategy is robust to modeling uncertainties in dynamic scenarios.

Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

This paper presents a leaderless cooperative guidance strategy for simultaneous time-constrained interception of a stationary target when the interceptors exchange information over switched dynamic graphs. We specifically focus on scenarios when the interceptors lack radial acceleration capabilities, relying solely on their lateral acceleration components. This consideration aligns with their inherent kinematic turn constraints. The proposed strategy explicitly addresses the complexities of coupled 3D engagements, thereby mitigating performance degradation that typically arises when the pitch and yaw channels are decoupled into two separate, mutually orthogonal planar engagements. Moreover, our formulation incorporates modeling uncertainties associated with the time-to-go estimation into the derivation of cooperative guidance commands to ensure robustness against inaccuracies in dynamic engagement scenarios. To optimize control efficiency, we analytically derive the lateral acceleration components in the orthogonal pitch and yaw channels by solving an instantaneous optimization problem, subject to an affine constraint. We show that the proposed cooperative guidance commands guarantee consensus in time-to-go values within a predefined time, which can be prescribed as a design parameter, regardless of the interceptors' initial configurations. We provide simulations to attest to the efficacy of the proposed method.