An event-triggered distributed cooperative guidance law for simultaneous attack with autopilot lag consideration

This article proposes an event-triggered distributed cooperative guidance law for multiple missiles to simultaneously attack a stationary target with consideration of autopilot lag and unknown disturbances. In order to achieve a consensus on each missile’s impact time and save communication costs, the guidance law is designed on the basis of an auxiliary variable consisting of the time-to-go expression and its time derivative. Driven by the properly designed event-triggered mechanism, the information interaction among missiles performs in a need-based scheme and there is no need to continuously monitor the consensus errors between neighbor missiles. By this means, the communication burden is significantly reduced while satisfactory guidance performance is still guaranteed. The proposed guidance law can be extended to a communication failure case where one of the missiles suddenly cannot receive information from its neighbors. An integral sliding mode controller is integrated with the nominal guidance law to eliminate the adverse effects caused by unknown disturbances. Numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed guidance design.