Optimal Design of Cooperative Guidance Law for Simultaneous Strike

This paper will derive an explicit cooperative guidance law that will steer a salvo of missiles in such a way that they all arrive at a target or targets simultaneously. It is shown that, by sharing missile state information, each missile can achieve cooperation while minimizing the control required. Optimal and cooperative control methods are used to derive the cooperative guidance law as well as a consensus time-to-go estimate to achieve this. For cooperative guidance to work, each missile needs to only communicate with some of the neighboring missile intermittently. Issues such as varying communication topologies are inherently accounted for in this proposed design. Therefore the salvo remains robust to communication losses and/or changing communication topologies. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of this guidance law and its robustness to varying communication topologies.