The problem of salvo attack of multiple missiles without time-to-go estimation has been addressed by a two-stage guidance scheme in this correspondence. In the first stage, a simple decentralized control law is designed to provide desired initial conditions (target-missile relative range and velocity lead angle) for the latter stage. As for the second stage, all missiles are governed by classical pure proportional navigation guidance law. Numerical simulations under two-dimensional and threedimensional cases demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation.

This paper studies the problem of air-to-air target following of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) motivated by the application of defense against malicious MAVs. When the bearing of the target MAV has been measured by the onboard visual sensor of the pursuer MAV, the problem becomes three-dimensional (3-D) bearing-only target following, which has been rarely studied in the literature and faces some unique challenges. To solve this problem, we propose the following novel results. First, to estimate the motion of the target MAV from 3-D bearing measurements, we propose a new pseudo-linear Kalman filter, which has a concise expression and superior stability compared to the classic ones such as the extended Kalman filter and modified polar coordinate filter. Second, we propose a novel approach to analyze the observability of state estimation when only bearing information is available. While the existing approaches are applicable to 2-D and single-step time-horizon cases, ours can handle more general 3-D and multiple-step time-horizon cases. Third, based on the theoretical conclusion of our observability analysis, we design a new 3-D helical guidance law that can better exploit the additional degree of freedom in 3D. The guidance law is adapted to the quadcopter's dynamics and a low-level flight controller is designed based on geometric control. Numerical simulation results verify the superior performance of the proposed algorithms compared to the state-of-the-art ones. Flight experiments on real quadrotor platforms further show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms in practice.

This paper considers the problem of two-dimensional constrained trajectory optimization of a point-mass aerial robot for constant-maneuvering target localization using bearing-only measurement. A performance metric that can be utilized in trajectory optimization to maximize target observability is proposed first based on geometric conditions. One-step optimal maneuver that maximizes the observability criterion is then derived analytically for moving targets. The heading angle constraint is also incorporated in the proposed optimal maneuver derivation to support practical application. Numerical simulations with some comparisons are presented to validate the analytical findings.

This paper aims to examine the potential of using the emerging deep reinforcement learning techniques in missile guidance applications. To this end, a Markovian decision process that enables the application of reinforcement learning theory to solve the guidance problem is formulated. A heuristic way is used to shape a proper reward function that has tradeoff between guidance accuracy, energy consumption, and interception time. The state-of-the-art deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm is used to learn an action policy that maps the observed engagements states to a guidance command. Extensive empirical numerical simulations are performed to validate the proposed computational guidance algorithm.

This paper proposes a novel joint multi-target tracking and track maintenance algorithm over a sensor network. Each sensor runs a local joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) filter using only its own measurements. Unlike the original JPDA approach, the proposed local filter utilizes the detection amplitude as domain knowledge to improve the estimation accuracy. In the fusion stage, the DBSCAN clustering in conjunction with statistical test is proposed to group all local tracks into several clusters. Each generated cluster represents the local tracks that are from the same target source and the global estimation of each cluster is obtained by the generalised covariance intersection algorithm. Extensive simulation results clearly confirm the effectiveness of the proposed multi-sensor multi-target tracking algorithm.