Combined and Cooperative Minimum-Effort Guidance Algorithms in an Active Aircraft Defense Scenario

The paper proposes two guidance algorithms for the target–attacker–defender scenario. The first is a combined guidance algorithm for the attacker that simultaneously achieves evasion from the defender and pursuit of the target. The second is a cooperative guidance algorithm for the target to evade the attacker and for the defender to pursue the evader. Both algorithms are derived under the assumption that performance is prescribed in the sense of the required maximum miss distance for pursuit and the required minimum miss distance for evasion, and the algorithms are minimizing the effort to achieve the requirements. It turns out that both the combined guidance algorithm and the cooperative guidance algorithm share a very similar structure. The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested in numerical simulations.