Impact-time-control Guidance Laws for Cooperative Attack of Multiple Missiles

Two major simultaneous attack strategies have been introduced, as one of cooperative attack of multiple missiles. One strategy is an undesignated time attack, in which the missiles communicate among themselves to synchronize the arrival times by reducing the mutual differences of times-to-go of multiple missiles during the homing. The other is a designated time attack, in which a common impact time is commanded to all members in advance, and thereafter each missile tries to home on the target on time independently. For this individual homing, Impact-Time-Control Guidance (ITCG) law is required. After introducing cooperative proportional navigation (CPN) for the first strategy, this article presents a new closed-form ITCG guidance solution for the second strategy. It is based on the linear formulation, employing base trajectories driven by PNG with various navigation constants. Nonlinear simulation of several engagement situations demonstrates the performance and feasibility of the proposed ITCG law.