Fixed-Time Terminal Angle-Constrained Cooperative Guidance Law Against Maneuvering Target

In this article, fixed-time cooperative guidance laws are designed for multiple missiles to simultaneously attack a maneuvering target at desired terminal angles. The 3-D guidance commands consist of tangential acceleration along line-of-sight (LOS) direction to achieve a salvo attack and normal acceleration perpendicular to the LOS direction to realize a terminal angle-constrained interception. First, the tangential acceleration is derived from a distributed cooperative protocol to guarantee the fixed-time consensus of impact times for multiple missiles. Second, based on the integral sliding manifold and fixed-time reaching law, the normal acceleration is developed for each missile to converge the LOS angle to the desired value within a fixed time. In particular, the unknown target acceleration components are estimated by fixed-time observers and compensated in the guidance commands. The fixed-time stability of the proposed cooperative guidance law is rigorously proved and the explicit estimate for the convergence time is theoretically provided. Then, the proposed methods are utilized to realize the cooperative mission in the planar guidance scenario. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed cooperative guidance laws are demonstrated through numerical simulations with comparative studies.