Cooperative homing guidance law of multiple anti-ship missiles for survivability enhancement

Abstract

In the modern naval battle environment, anti-surface warfare is considered to be a crucial element in achieving sea superiority and a lot of research and development has been conducted on anti-ship missiles as the means of a hard kill weapons system. Considering the maneuver tactics of surface vessels in operation groups and defense tactics of high-value targets such as frigates and battleships with diverse defense systems, efforts should be made to increase the survivability of anti-ship missiles through attacks which utilize multiple guided missiles. Therefore, this paper proposes new cooperative homing guidance to enhance the survivability of multiple anti-ship missiles against high-value targets such a frigates or battleships when prior information on the target is unknown. In this paper, the survivability enhancement for multiple anti-ship missiles against battleships with no preliminary information on the current direction they’re heading in and their weak spots is realized by satisfying relative intercept angle constraints between neighboring missiles. To this end, a one-to-one guidance law providing a zero-miss distance and the desired intercept angle are extended to a multi-to-one engagement case, under the explicit cooperation concept. To be more specific, to create a set of the one-to-one guidance laws, a cooperative way to determine a set of the desired intercept angles among the multiple missiles must be developed. In the proposed method, the set of the desired intercept angles are selected to satisfy the pre-determined relative angle constraints for enhancing the survivability of the anti-ship missiles as well as to minimize the overall control energy for further increasing the missions’ success rates. Numerical simulations have confirmed the performance of the proposed method.