Abstract

To save the communication bandwidth and the missile-borne computing resources, a distributed cooperative guidance law based on the event-triggered mechanism is proposed, which enables the missiles with large differences in spatial location and velocity to achieve simultaneous attacks with only a few dozen information exchanges. The guidance process is divided into two stages. The first stage is the cooperative guidance stage, where missiles achieve consensus of the time-to-go estimates through information exchange. In this stage, each missile is designed with an event-triggered function based on its own state error, and the missile only updates and transmits its information in the communication network when the error meets the set threshold, effectively reducing the occupancy rate of missile-borne resources during the cooperation process. The second stage is the independent guidance stage, where missiles can hit the target simultaneously while keeping the communication network silent. This is achieved by ensuring that the time-to-go estimates of missiles can represent the real time-to-go after achieving consensus. By the design of the two-stage guidance law and the replacement of the event-triggered function, the cooperative guidance system can be ensured to remain stable in scenarios where the leader missile is present and destroyed, and exclude Zeno behavior. The stability of the cooperative guidance law is rigorously proved by algebraic graph theory, matrix theory, and the Lyapunov method. Finally, The numerical simulation results demonstrate the validity of the algorithm and the correctness of the stability analysis.