Predefined-time One-Shot Cooperative Estimation, Guidance, and Control for Simultaneous Target Interception

2026-01-12

AI Summary

This work addresses the problem of cooperative simultaneous interception of a stationary target under heterogeneous sensing topologies, where some interceptors lack seekers and the target state is only partially observable. A unified nonlinear estimation-guidance-control framework is proposed, wherein a prescribed-time distributed observer enables seekerless interceptors to estimate the target state. Cooperative guidance commands are generated by integrating an improved time-to-go estimation with a prescribed-time consensus protocol, and executed by canard-driven autopilots. The designed prescribed-time sliding mode control law guarantees nonsingular, full-chain convergence within a predetermined time. Simulations demonstrate that the approach achieves high-accuracy state estimation, rapid time consensus, and precise command tracking across diverse engagement geometries, effectively enabling multiple missiles to achieve simultaneous impact within a wide launch envelope.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Sequential Decision Making

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

Abstract

This work develops a unified nonlinear estimation-guidance-control framework for cooperative simultaneous interception of a stationary target under a heterogeneous sensing topology, where sensing capabilities are non-uniform across interceptors. Specifically, only a subset of agents is instrumented with onboard seekers (informed/seeker-equipped agents), whereas the rest of them (seeker-less agents) acquire the information about the target indirectly via the informed agents and execute a distributed cooperative guidance for simultaneous target interception. To address the resulting partial observability, a predefined-time distributed observer is leveraged, guaranteeing convergence of the target state estimates for seeker-less agents through information exchange with seeker-equipped neighbors over a directed communication graph. Thereafter, an improved time-to-go estimate accounting for wide launch envelopes is utilized to design the distributed cooperative guidance commands. This estimate is coupled with a predefined-time consensus protocol, ensuring consensus in the agents'time-to-go values. The temporal upper bounds within which both observer error and time-to-go consensus error converge to zero can be prescribed as design parameters. Furthermore, the cooperative guidance commands are realized by means of an autopilot, wherein the interceptor is steered by canard actuation. The corresponding fin deflection commands are generated using a predefined-time convergent sliding mode control law. This enables the autopilot to precisely track the commanded lateral acceleration within a design-specified time, while maintaining non-singularity of the overall design. Theoretical guarantees are supported by numerical simulations across diverse engagement geometries, verifying the estimation accuracy, the cooperative interception performance, and the autopilot response using the proposed scheme.

Problem

• cooperative interception
• partial observability
• heterogeneous sensing
• simultaneous target interception
• seeker-less agents

Innovation

• predefined-time convergence
• distributed observer
• cooperative guidance
• time-to-go consensus
• sliding mode control