Three-Dimensional Prescribed Performance Cooperative Guidance Without Relative Distance Measurement

This article investigates the problem of three-dimensional cooperative interception of maneuvering target by laser beam riding steered (LBRS) interceptor with arbitrary launch positions. The main feature of the proposed guidance strategy accommodates arbitrary initial system states without constraints. To facilitate this design, a nonlinear mapping between the initial values of the prescribed performance function (PPF) and the system initial values was established. A prescribed performance guidance law is first developed such that the relative position converges to zero within a predefined distance, regardless of the launch position. Based on this, the time-to-go can be obtained indirectly, and a cooperative guidance law is then derived to achieve simultaneous interception of maneuvering target, where the switching topologies are used to mitigate the influence of initial time-to-go estimation accuracy on the cooperative performance, and a smooth transition strategy is employed to eliminate chattering issues at switching points. Extensive simulations are performed to support our findings.