A cooperative line-of-sight guidance law for a three-dimensional phantom track generation using unmanned aerial vehicles

A cooperative guidance law for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles is addressed to deceive air defense radar networks by generating a so-called phantom track. The problem is viewed as a line of sight guidance problem in which unmanned aerial vehicles track the line of sight of a phantom. A guidance law based on input-output feedback linearization is developed in order to deal with a situation in which the phantom condition is not satisfied. The resultant solution is obtained in a feedback form. Since the system is over-actuated, a control allocation optimization problem is formulated and solved by adding an additional objective term to the cost function that forces unmanned aerial vehicles to fly parallel to the phantom using a predictive control method. A closed-form solution is constructed for the unmanned aerial vehicles trajectory corresponding to the pre-specified phantom track. The proposed method is expanded through a scenario in which multiple unmanned aerial vehicles cooperatively generate a coherent phantom track toward a desired waypoint by engaging with the same number of radars. The performance of the proposed guidance law is demonstrated through a simulation study.