Cooperative Integrated Estimation-Guidance for Simultaneous Interception of Moving Targets

2025-10-30

AI Summary

In multi-UAV cooperative interception of non-maneuvering targets, heterogeneous sensor configurations—where only a subset of UAVs possess target observation capability—severely limit system observability. Method: This paper proposes an integrated estimation-guidance framework that innovatively couples a prescribed-time observer with true proportional navigation guidance (TPNG), enabling distributed target-state estimation for sensor-less UAVs under directed communication topologies while ensuring consensus convergence of time-to-go across the entire formation. Contribution/Results: A distributed interaction mechanism and an exact time-to-go computation method are designed to tightly couple guidance laws with estimation dynamics. Simulations demonstrate high-accuracy target-state estimation and synchronized interception across all UAVs under diverse engagement geometries, significantly enhancing robustness and precision of cooperative interception under heterogeneous sensing conditions.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

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 privacy protection in personalized systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

This paper proposes a cooperative integrated estimation-guidance framework for simultaneous interception of a non-maneuvering target using a team of unmanned autonomous vehicles, assuming only a subset of vehicles are equipped with dedicated sensors to measure the target's states. Unlike earlier approaches that focus solely on either estimation or guidance design, the proposed framework unifies both within a cooperative architecture. To circumvent the limitation posed by heterogeneity in target observability, sensorless vehicles estimate the target's state by leveraging information exchanged with neighboring agents over a directed communication topology through a prescribed-time observer. The proposed approach employs true proportional navigation guidance (TPNG), which uses an exact time-to-go formulation and is applicable across a wide spectrum of target motions. Furthermore, prescribed-time observer and controller are employed to achieve convergence to true target's state and consensus in time-to-go within set predefined times, respectively. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework under various engagement scenarios.

Problem

• Simultaneous interception of moving targets by multiple autonomous vehicles
• Addressing limited target observability with heterogeneous sensor capabilities
• Unifying estimation and guidance within cooperative prescribed-time framework

Innovation

• Cooperative integrated estimation-guidance framework for interception
• Prescribed-time observer for target state estimation
• True proportional navigation guidance with exact time-to-go