Linear Quadratic Optimal Cooperative Strategies for Active Aircraft Protection

Aircraft protection from a missile employing a known linear guidance strategy is considered. The aircraft protects itself by using a cooperating defensive missile. Depending on the available cooperation scheme, three different cooperative linear quadratic guidance strategies are derived and investigated for arbitrary-order linear-adversaries dynamics: 1) two-way cooperation, where the target–defender team employs its optimal cooperative strategy, 2) one-way cooperation, realized by the defender employing a classical one-on-one guidance law while the target helps by luring in the missile, and 3) one-way cooperation, realized by the target employing an arbitrary evasive strategy while the defender attempts to reach the predicted interception point. The performance of the three different cooperative strategies is compared and analyzed via simulation using the notion of Pareto fronts. It is shown that the performance of the target and the defender is highly dependent on the cooperation scheme. As expected, the two-way cooperation scheme provides the best performance. Yet, one-way cooperation schemes attain considerably better results than independent actions.