Time-Constrained Individual Homing Guidance against Stationary Targets

Abstract

In this paper, terminal sliding mode control based impact time-constrained guidance strategies are proposed, which enable the pursuers to achieve individual homing based simultaneous interception of a stationary target. Guidance commands are derived using switching surfaces based on range errors and their rates. As the guidance laws are designed using nonlinear engagement kinematics, the proposed strategies achieve salvo interception at desired impact time even for the engagement with large heading angle errors. Unlike most of the existing guidance strategies, the proposed guidance strategies circumvent the possible degradations due to erroneous time-to-go estimates. The proposed strategies are shown to perform satisfactorily for different impact times and also exhibited desirable terminal features as compared to existing salvo strategies.