Proportional Navigation-Based Guidance for an Autonomous Interdiction Mission Against a Stationary Target

Due to the rapid increase of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usage, the demand for efficient autonomous interdiction techniques to safeguard protected areas has become increasingly essential. This paper presents novel guidance strategies based on Proportional Navigation (PN) to interdict a stationary target using single and multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). While the previous literature has primarily addressed controlling the terminal angle and achieving a desired final time separately for single-pursuer and multi-pursuer setups, designing guidance strategies to achieve both simultaneously poses a significant challenge. Although few existing literature endeavor to satisfy both constraints, they lack in guaranteeing an all-aspect approach. To this end, this paper’s main contribution is enabling pursuers to achieve any terminal configuration starting from any initial orientation while satisfying the final time constraint by employing PN-based multi-phase guidance strategies in single and multiple pursuer setups. While the ‘Preparation phase’ at the beginning and the ‘Final PPN phase’ at the end help ensure the desired terminal orientation, the intermediate Roaming phase helps achieve the desired final time. Also, the guarantee on phase transitions and performance of the overall guidance schemes and conditions on achievable final time for the success of the developed guidance schemes are analyzed. Finally, using numerical simulations, the developed guidance algorithms are validated for single and multiple pursuer(s) environments considering realistic constraints.