Free Will Arbitrary Time Consensus-Based Cooperative Salvo Guidance over Leader-Follower Network

In this paper, a cooperative salvo guidance strategy using free-will arbitrary time consensus over a leader-follower communication network is proposed. Guidance commands are derived considering nonlinear engagement kinematics and a system lag to account for the effect of interceptor autopilot, so as to capture realistic scenarios. The guidance schemes utilize the time-to-go estimates of all interceptors to achieve simultaneous target interception. The agreement among time-to-go of all interceptors is achieved within a fixed time, to which the interceptors’ time-to-go converge within a settling time that is bounded above. This time-to-go, as well as the aforesaid bound on settling time, can be pre-specified arbitrarily independent of the initial conditions or the design parameters, which allows the interceptors to converge on a stationary target simultaneously at a predetermined impact time. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed guidance strategy.