To address the issue of jitter and oscillation of guidance command during multi-vehicle cooperative engagement with maneuvering platforms, this paper proposes a novel terminal guidance law with prescribed performance constraints for multiple cooperative vehicles, which explicitly considers both transient and steady-state performance. Firstly, based on the vehicle-target relative kinematics, with time and space as the main constraint indicators, a multi-vehicle cooperative guidance model is established in the inertial coordinate system. Secondly, combined with the sliding mode control theory, cooperative guidance laws are designed for both the line-of-sight (LOS) direction and the LOS normal direction, respectively, and the Lyapunov stability proof is given. Furthermore, to counteract the impact of target maneuvers on guidance performance, a non-homogeneous disturbance observer is designed to estimate target maneuver information that is difficult to obtain directly, which ensures that performance constraints are still satisfied under strong target maneuvering conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed guidance law enables multiple coordinated vehicles to successfully engage the target under different maneuvering modes, while satisfying the terminal time-space constraints. Compared with conventional sliding mode control methods exhibiting inherent chattering, the proposed approach employs a novel PPC-SMC hybrid structure to quantitatively constrain the transient convergence of cooperative errors. This structure enhances the multi-vehicle cooperative guidance performance by effectively eliminating chattering and oscillations in the guidance commands, thereby significantly improving the system’s transient behavior.

To address time-varying communication topology, actuator response delay, and limited inter-UAV communication resources in the multi-UAV approach of a maneuvering target, this paper proposes a cooperative rendezvous/tracking control law combining a prescribed-time extended state observer (PTESO) with a dynamic event-triggered mechanism (DET). A three-state PTESO is designed whose observation error converges, within a prescribed time independent of the initial error, into a compact set related to the disturbance upper bound. Along the line-of-sight (LOS) direction, the remaining flight times of the UAVs are driven to consensus within a prescribed time toward a specified arrival instant via a threshold-adaptive DET; along the LOS normal direction, prescribed-time convergence of the elevation and azimuth angle errors is achieved through a time-varying-gain sliding surface. The guidance gains are designed from the worst-case algebraic connectivity of the candidate topology set, ensuring uniform validity under arbitrary switching. After accounting for first-order autopilot inertial dynamics, the command tracking error is proven uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulations of four UAVs cooperatively approaching a maneuvering non-cooperative object under periodic topology switching and actuator delay show an arrival-time deviation below 0.01 s, a terminal position error under 0.08 m, and 75–91 average inter-UAV triggers, outperforming existing prescribed-time/fixed-time cooperative guidance methods.

Modern UAV swarm operations face strict onboard bandwidth and autonomy constraints, making simultaneous multi-target interception under limited communication a critical unsolved challenge. This paper addresses three-dimensional cooperative interception of maneuvering targets by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at prescribed line-of-sight (LOS) angles under limited communication resources. In the LOS direction, a fixed-time consensus-based guidance law is designed with remaining flight time as the coordination variable, synchronizing each UAV’s impact time to a freely specified desired value with bounded gains throughout the engagement. Unlike most existing fixed-time cooperative guidance works, the consensus convergence time is rigorously proven to be strictly less than the maximum initial predicted flight time, guaranteeing impact-time agreement is reached before any UAV intercepts the target—a necessary condition for genuine simultaneous salvo attack. A dynamic event-triggered (DET) mechanism is incorporated to reduce inter-UAV communication frequency by adaptively updating the triggering threshold according to consensus state evolution. In the LOS normal directions, a piecewise nonsingular terminal sliding-mode law ensures fixed-time convergence of the LOS angle and its rate to desired values under impact-angle constraints. Fixed-time stability and Zeno-behavior exclusion are rigorously established via Lyapunov analysis. Comparative simulations against existing methods demonstrate clear advantages in impact-time accuracy, guidance smoothness, and communication efficiency.