Fast Online Trajectory Generation for Time Adjustable Flight Consensus

In this paper, a fast online guidance law generation method is proposed to resolve the flight time control guidance design problem for time adjustable flight consensus via an analytical polynomial shaping approach. The obtained guidance command is explicit such that fast online trajectory generation is applicable without blind parameters to be designed or tuned. Specifically, the polynomial shaping approach is employed to construct a reference relative range profile by a cubic polynomial in terms of a look angle-based auxiliary. The reference profile is solved by initial and terminal flight conditions. Meanwhile, the field-of-view limit is also achieved by explicitly deriving the conditions to be met for the reference profile's coefficients. Notably, the proposed technique does not rely on the error-prone time-to-go approximation. The trajectory generation command is derived using the guidance model under the expected relative range profile, and is finally presented as a proportional navigation guidance-like law which has simple structure and guaranteed effectiveness. Extensive numerical simulations under various flight consensus scenarios, comparison study, as well as Monte Carlo test under measurement errors and uncertainties are conducted to validate the proposed method.