Minimum time state consensus for cooperative attack of multi-missile systems

This paper considers the cooperative attack with multiple missiles on a stationary target and a two-step procedure is proposed. First the states of all missiles are guided to achieve minimum time consensus, and then, by using the proportional navigation guidance law with identical navigation gain each missile arrives at the target simultaneously or sequentially. Among which, the strategy to realize state consensus in minimum time is the focus of the issue. In the paper the coordination algorithms are developed based on bang-bang control strategy due to its simply structure, subsequently, it is proved that the time optimal consensus problem can be transformed into a parameter optimization problem. Besides, the proposed schemes are able to significantly reduce the number of parameters to be optimized and finally solve the problem with little computation cost. Different from the impact time control methods, the strategy for state consensus does not demand the information of time-to-go. Meanwhile only the initial values of missiles' states are required for the coordination algorithms which lead to less communication burden. Two different examples are provided to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our proposed strategy.