Cooperative Impact Time Guidance for AAVs: Theory and Experiment

The role of autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) swarms on the battlefield is becoming increasingly significant. They are anticipated to emerge as the primary offensive and strike weapon in the future. In contrast to existing cooperative guidance strategies, which are largely confined to the assumption of constant forward velocity, we designed a cooperative impact time guidance strategy that allows for adjustable forward velocity. Our analysis shows that by introducing time-varying proportional guidance coefficients and time-to-go estimation, the proposed cooperative guidance law is equivalent to the energy-optimal cooperative guidance law. Simulations and flight tests are employed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first practical test in which a cooperative guidance algorithm has been integrated with AAVs.