Cooperative Guidance for Aerial Defense in Multiagent Systems

2025-10-02

AI Summary

In contested airspace, defending high-value assets against adversarial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires real-time, multi-agent collaborative interception—a challenge exacerbated by dynamic threats, limited information, and scalability constraints. Method: This paper proposes a time-constrained evasion–defense cooperative guidance framework that eliminates assumptions about the attacker’s strategy and avoids global information exchange. Integrating true proportional navigation with finite-time convergent control, it enables fully distributed, autonomous decision-making from arbitrary initial configurations. Contribution/Results: The framework guarantees strict convergence of interception errors within a predefined fixed time, ensuring strong robustness and seamless scalability. Simulation results demonstrate significantly improved interception success rates and real-time responsiveness under highly dynamic and uncertain adversarial conditions, overcoming key limitations of conventional differential game and optimal control approaches—particularly regarding online computability, adaptability, and deployment scalability.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Adversarial Learning
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

This paper addresses a critical aerial defense challenge in contested airspace, involving three autonomous aerial vehicles -- a hostile drone (the pursuer), a high-value drone (the evader), and a protective drone (the defender). We present a cooperative guidance framework for the evader-defender team that guarantees interception of the pursuer before it can capture the evader, even under highly dynamic and uncertain engagement conditions. Unlike traditional heuristic, optimal control, or differential game-based methods, we approach the problem within a time-constrained guidance framework, leveraging true proportional navigation based approach that ensures robust and guaranteed solutions to the aerial defense problem. The proposed strategy is computationally lightweight, scalable to a large number of agent configurations, and does not require knowledge of the pursuer's strategy or control laws. From arbitrary initial geometries, our method guarantees that key engagement errors are driven to zero within a fixed time, leading to a successful mission. Extensive simulations across diverse and adversarial scenarios confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and its relevance for real-time autonomous defense in contested airspace environments.

Problem

• Guarantees pursuer interception before evader capture
• Ensures robust aerial defense under dynamic uncertainty
• Provides computationally lightweight scalable guidance without pursuer strategy knowledge

Innovation

• Cooperative guidance framework for aerial defense
• Time-constrained true proportional navigation approach
• Computationally lightweight strategy without pursuer knowledge