Cooperative Guidance for Simultaneous Interception Using Multiple Sliding Surfaces

A cooperative guidance strategy is developed to force multiple interceptors to intercept a target simultaneously. The guidance law works to minimize the time-to-go difference between neighboring interceptors while still keeping the interceptors on track for interception. The guidance law is derived using sliding mode control, with one sliding surface for every pair of neighboring interceptors to remove time-to-go difference and one global sliding surface to make sure at least one interceptor is heading towards the target, guaranteeing the others as well. A time-to-go approximation scheme for a stationary target is used during the derivation. A two-dimensional nonlinear simulation of the relative kinematics is run for cases of both two interceptors and more, in which the guidance law is shown to successfully cause simultaneous interception between multiple interceptors starting from different initial conditions.