A novel cooperative mid-course guidance scheme for multiple intercepting missiles

In the interception engagement, if the target movement information is not accurate enough for the mid-course guidance of intercepting missiles, the interception mission may fail as a result of large handover errors. This paper proposes a novel cooperative mid-course guidance scheme for multiple missiles to intercept a target under the condition of large detection errors. Under this scheme, the launch and interception moments are staggered for different missiles. The earlier launched missiles can obtain a relatively accurate detection to the target during their terminal guidance, based on which the latter missiles are permitted to eliminate the handover error in the mid-course guidance. A significant merit of this scheme is that the available resources are fully exploited and less missiles are needed to achieve the interception mission. To this end, first, the design of cooperative handover parameters is formulated as an optimization problem. Then, an algorithm based on Monte Carlo sampling and stochastic approximation is proposed to solve this optimization problem, and the convergence of the algorithm is proved as well. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative scheme and algorithm.