Coverage-based cooperative encirclement strategy against high-speed and highly maneuvering targets

Hypersonic vehicles, characterized by rapid flight speed and strong maneuverability, pose a significant threat as offensive weapons capable of swiftly delivering precise long-range strikes. However, current defensive aircraft lack sufficient maneuverability to effectively engage these high-speed and highly mobile targets. To address the challenges posed by offensive hypersonic vehicles, this paper proposes a distributed cooperative encirclement strategy for high-speed and highly maneuverable targets based on coverage theory. The strategy aims to address two main issues: first, how to design an optimal initial formation that ensures complete coverage of the target’s escape boundary by multiple aircraft; and second, how to stably achieve this formation under constraints such as nonlinear models, unknown target maneuvers, and directed communication topologies. To address these issues, first, the maneuvering characteristics of both the aircraft and the target are considered, including parameters such as speed relationships and maximum overload ratios. The concept of Apollonius circles is then introduced to analyze the encirclement area, laying the theoretical foundation for subsequent formation design. Second, the concept of Dubins curves is utilized to calculate the equivalent escape boundary of the target. Owing to the inherent limitations of a single aircraft in effectively covering the target’s escape boundary, the utilization of multiple aircraft to form a larger encirclement area and achieve complete coverage of the target’s potential escape routes is proposed. According to the concept of overlap angle, a redundant coverage strategy is introduced. The strategy enables the calculation of the optimal number of aircraft required at the outset. Subsequently, an encirclement formation is designed to facilitate the optimal combination of the multiple aircraft’s encirclement areas, and a comprehensive coverage of the target’s escape boundary is realized. Then, a distributed cooperative guidance law for encircling high-speed and highly maneuverable targets based on a consensus protocol is designed. This protocol sets the angles between the aircraft and the target in the initial encirclement formation as formation vectors, enabling multiple aircraft to achieve the designed encirclement formation and prevent the target from escaping once encircled. Finally, numerical simulations of the proposed coverage strategy in a two-dimensional plane are conducted. These simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed consensus-based cooperative guidance law in achieving the initial encirclement formation under various constraints. Furthermore, these results verify the ability of the designed encirclement formation to effectively capture the target under both maximum constant maneuvering escape and random maneuvering scenarios. Three-dimensional simulation results are obtained through the combination of simulation results from two two-dimensional planes, further validating the scalability and superiority of the designed formation and guidance law.