Cooperative Guidance Scheme for Flight of Multiple Combat UAVs against a Non-Accelerating Moving Target

Over period of time, UAVs have become the weapon of choice to carry out ISTAR (Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance) missions as they are considered suitable to carry out dull, dangerous and dirty roles without presenting any danger or challenge to a human pilot. Modern combat UAVs therefore are equipped with all necessary payloads fulfilling a hunter-killer configuration, in order to swing its role depending upon the tactical situation. However, of lately, it is realized that a close formation of low-cost UAVs might be more effective and efficient as compared to one high performance expensive platform. Such strategy has greater chances of over-burdening or saturating the defensive sensor acquisition and its subsequent fire power, thus resulting in to a successful mission execution. Therefore, the study of guidance schemes which can bring UAVs simultaneously to the target is of significance. This research paper presents a cooperative guidance scheme for multiple UAVs, enabling them to reach simultaneously onto a non-accelerated moving target. The strategy used in this research is based on undesignated time of arrival for each UAV. The UAVs match their time of reaching to the target via exchanging their time among themselves while reducing their mutual standard deviation of time-to-go. This scheme is based on classical Proportional Navigation Guidance (PNG) law in which navigational gain is variable with respect to time. In this work a novel time-to-go estimation method is proposed for non-accelerating moving target. In order to gauge the efficacy of this novel method, it was compared with two other established time-to-go methods available in literature. The strength of proposed scheme is demonstrated using simulations for multiple case scenarios.