Anti-Interception Guidance for Hypersonic Glide Vehicle: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Abstract

Anti-interception guidance can enhance a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) compard to multiple interceptors. In general, anti-interception guidance for aircraft can be divided into procedural guidance, fly-around guidance and active evading guidance. However, these guidance methods cannot be applied to an HGV’s unknown real-time process due to limited intelligence information or on-board computing abilities. In this paper, an anti-interception guidance approach based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is proposed. First, the penetration process is conceptualized as a generalized three-body adversarial optimal (GTAO) problem. The problem is then modelled as a Markov decision process (MDP), and a DRL scheme consisting of an actor-critic architecture is designed to solve this. Reusing the same sample batch during training results in fewer serious estimation errors in the critic network (CN), which provides better gradients to the immature actor network (AN). We propose a new mechanismcalled repetitive batch training (RBT). In addition, the training data and test results confirm that the RBT can improve the traditional DDPG-based-methodes.