Cooperative differential games guidance laws for multiple attackers against an active defense target

This paper is concerned with a scenario of multiple attackers trying to intercept a target with active defense. Three types of agents are considered in the guidance: The multiple attackers, the target and the defender, where the attackers aim to pursuit the target from different directions and evade from the defender simultaneously. The guidance engagement is formulated in the framework of a zero-sum two-person differential game between the two opposing teams, such that the measurements on the maneuver of the target or estimations on the defending strategy of the defender can be absent. Cooperation of the attackers resides in two aspects: redundant interception under the threat of the defender and the relative intercept geometry with the target. The miss distances, the relative intercept angle errors and the costs of the agents are combined into a single performance index of the game. Such formulation enables a unitary approach to the design of guidance laws for the agents. To minimize the control efforts and miss distances for the attackers, an optimization method is proposed to find the best anticipated miss distances to the defender under the constraint that the defender is endowed with a capture radius. Numerical simulations with two cases are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative guidance law.