Evasion guidance algorithms for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles in three-player pursuit-evasion games

In practical combat scenario, the cooperative intercept strategies are often carefully designed, and it is challenging for the hypersonic vehicles to achieve successful evasion. Based on the analysis, it can be found that if several Successive Pursuers come from the Same Direction (SPSD) and flight with a proper spacing, the evasion difficulty may increase greatly. To address this problem, we focus on the evasion guidance strategy design for the Air-breathing Hypersonic Vehicles (AHVs) under the SPSD combat scenario. In order to avoid the induced influence on the scramjet, altitude and speed of the vehicle, the lateral maneuver and evasion are employed. To guarantee the remnant maneuver ability, the concept of specified miss distance is introduced and utilized to generate the guidance command for the AHV. In the framework of constrained optimal control, the analytical expression of the evasion command is derived, and the constraints of the overload can be ensured to be never violated. In fact, by analyzing the spacing of the pursers, it can be classified whether the cooperative pursuit is formed. For the coordination-unformed multiple pursers, the evasion can be achieved lightly by the proposed strategy. If the coordination is formed, the proposed method will generate a large reverse direction maneuver, and the successful evasion can be maintained as a result. The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested in numerical simulations.