Cooperative Circular Guidance of Multiple Missiles: A Practical Prescribed-Time Consensus Approach

This paper develops a new class of distributed cooperative guidance laws under both undirected and directed communication topologies based on the circular guidance and the practical prescribed-time consensus. The circular guidance law is augmented with a bias term to achieve impact time synchronization within a prescribed time. The analytical time-to-go expression under the circular guidance law is utilized to ensure the impact time cooperation accuracy. Not only convergence rate but also acceleration magnitude reduction is guaranteed due to the merits of the practical prescribed-time consensus. Moreover, based on the predicted interception point, the proposed guidance laws are extended to a nonmaneuvering target. Finally, numerical simulations in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional scenarios verify the effectiveness, robustness, and superiority of the proposed guidance laws.