Cooperative integrated guidance and control for multiple hypersonic flight vehicles with prescribed time and performance

Recently, integrated guidance and control (IGC) has been widely employed to tackle cooperative guidance problems for multiple missiles. Nevertheless, achieving prescribed-time convergence within such a framework for multiple hypersonic flight vehicles remains a challenging and underexplored area. To address this issue, this paper systematically proposes a cooperative IGC scheme ensuring prescribed time and performance, while simultaneously accounting for composite disturbances (including unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances) and multiple practical constraints (such as field-of-view constraint and input saturation). Specifically, an IGC model is developed incorporating both actuator dynamics and input saturation, and a prescribed-time prescribed performance function, independent of initial conditions, is designed to constrain coordination and tracking errors. Based on the leader-follower architecture, the prescribed-time prescribed performance distributed cooperative guidance laws are proposed. This approach ensures coordination of both impact time and flight position, eliminating the reliance of traditional methods on precise time-to-go estimation, while simultaneously accounting for the field-of-view constraint and terminal guidance switching. Subsequently, based on the backstepping control, the prescribed-time prescribed performance robust tracking control laws are designed to ensure rapid tracking in each control loop. This design integrates an extended state observer with prescribed-time convergence to estimate and compensate for composite disturbances, alongside a high-order auxiliary system to handle input saturation. Furthermore, the stability of the closed-loop system with prescribed-time convergence and prescribed performance is rigorously proved using Lyapunov theory, and guidelines for controller parameter selection are provided. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method in cooperative strike missions against ground targets, demonstrating its capability to achieve high impact accuracy and coordination effectiveness while guaranteeing rapid convergence and low steady-state errors.