TASP PhD Seminar – Vitaly Shalumov – “Cooperative Guidance for Active Aircraft Protection”

Work towards PhD degree under the supervision of  Prof. Tal Shima

When: 5.5.2021 at 10:30

Where: zoom

Abstract: The presented research deals with an interception scenario that consists of multiple maneuvering aircrafts and missiles defending said aircrafts from multiple incoming threats. The main objective of the research is to address the inherent coupling between aircrafts’ and defenders’ guidance and defenders’ allocation in the aforementioned multi-agent scenario, by developing novel cooperative guidance and weapon – target allocation (WTA) strategies. The talk will begin with the presentation of a problem in which the interception of the attacker by the defender is uncertain, leading to possible defenders-to-attackers re-allocations mid-flight. The research yielded guidance laws designed to deliver optimal average performance over all the possible allocation decision sequences, thus compensating for the allocation uncertainty. To ensure the feasibility of each re-allocation, we extended the aforementioned guidance laws to include a re-allocation feasibility constraint. Concretely, we enforced a constraint that all the attackers are within the defender’s seeker field of view at re-allocation time. The optimal controller for the coupled uncertain – constrained problem will be presented along with its performance analysis. Finally, we will address the problem in which the WTA scheme is not fixed and is thus subject to optimization. The investigation yielded a family of linear cooperative guidance laws and a general work frame for the development of static (i.e., before launch) WTA algorithms. The presentation of the developed WTA algorithms and their performance in comparison to an optimal WTA will conclude the talk.