A max-consensus cyclic pursuit based guidance law for simultaneous target interception

This paper presents a new guidance law to achieve simultaneous interception of a stationary target by a team of n heterogeneous pursuers, modelled with non-linear unicycle kinematics. The proposed law implements a max-consensus protocol to achieve simultaneous target interception where consensus is achieved in the impact times of the pursuers. To achieve interception, we propose a guidance law for each pursuer using a cyclic pursuit framework where each pursuer requires the position and speed information pertaining to itself and its neighbour only. The proposed guidance law is designed using a PI controller which eliminates any deviations from the desired trajectories. Non-linear simulations are conducted for various scenarios to study the guidance law, showing that simultaneous interception of the target is achieved at the minimum possible time from arbitrary initial positions of the pursuers.