Interagent Distance Control in a Cooperative Multiagent Target-Missile-Defender Engagement

A cooperative interception scenario between a maneuvering target, its defenders, and missiles attacking the said target is considered. The straightforward approach for optimal guidance laws synthesis for the scenario participants is to adopt objectives from the single agent target-missile-defender engagement analysis. This leads to a multiobjective optimization problem in which the cost function consists out of the squared miss distance and the control effort. In this article, we suggest to alter the aforementioned cost function in order to address the need to control the proximity level between the agents, a concept that is usually not accounted for in guidance law development. This approach utilizes the same quadratic framework, making it easy to add/include into traditional systems. Defensive (defenders collision avoidance) and offensive (missiles collision encouragement) cooperative distance control laws are developed for the end game phase using the same information used to implement the guidance law. Simulation results show that the desired distance control behavior can be achieved via the proposed method.