Risk-Aware Input-Constrained Safe Intercept Guidance Against Multiple Moving Defenders

Abstract

This paper develops a risk-aware guidance law for an attacker to intercept a stationary target in the presence of multiple moving defenders while respecting the control input limits. We represent defender threats via engagement zones (EZs) (regions of state-space from which attacker interception is feasible) and employ the dynamic maneuvering cue (DMC) (minimum heading correction to exit EZs) as a deterministic measure of geometric risk. Safety is enforced through a prescribed bound on the DMC to enable controlled EZ penetration subject to a specified risk tolerance. For multiple defenders, the corresponding safety constraints are combined through a smooth-minimum aggregation. The proposed guidance strategy drives the attacker toward the target when the engagement remains safe and transitions to an avoidance maneuver as the prescribed safety boundary is approached. The resulting online optimization-free guidance law directly bounds the applied lateral acceleration and initiates a bounded preemptive maneuver before corrective action is required. Closed-loop analysis establishes preservation of the prescribed risk constraints under pointwise bounded-input feasibility and finite-time target interception under a sustained target-accessibility condition. Numerical studies validate the proposed strategy and illustrate the tradeoff between allowable geometric risk and interception performance.