Adaptive cooperative guidance with resilience to communication link faults

This paper focuses on the cooperative guidance problem of leader–follower flight vehicles with resilience to unknown communication link faults, while the followers are seeker-less. The modified proportional navigation guidance law is adopted for the leader. As for the followers, an adaptive distributed observer is presented to weaken the fault effect by estimating the leader's state, which relaxes the requirement of the upper bound on the change rate and limitation on the maximum number of faults. Based on the designed observer, a position-based cooperative guidance law is proposed to synchronize the position location of flight vehicles with state deviations among them for collision avoidance, where no target information or time-to-go estimation is utilized. Moreover, the convergence time can be more accurately estimated by establishing an explicit relationship with the controller gains. Governed by the proposed cooperative guidance strategy, the seeker-less followers can hit the target simultaneously with the leader under the communication link faults. Simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness.