Cooperative interception of a highly manoeuvrable aerial target

In this paper, cooperative and non-cooperative interception of a highly manoeuvrable aerial target is studied. Each interceptor has a radio frequency seeker and they can cooperate by sharing relative position data of the target between each other. Interacting multiple model filter is used to track the target in terminal phase. In interacting multiple model filter structure, a bank-of-Kalman filter is designed by using acceleration and jerk models to provide high performance tracking of the target. Miss distance of the cooperative and non-cooperative interception scenarios are evaluated via Monte Carlo simulations for increasing number of missiles. It is observed that, up to a certain degree, the average miss distance decreases with the number of cooperative missiles fired at the target. In addition, results also show that the decay rate of miss distance versus number of missiles depend on the manoeuvrability of the target.