WITHDRAWN: GPS-Denied Guidance Strategy for Safe Target Interception Under Multi-Defender Threats

This paper presents a nonlinear guidance strategy for a non-holonomic attacker to intercept a stationary target while avoiding being intercepted by multiple defenders. Unlike prior methods that rely on explicit knowledge of defender strategies, we quantify defender-induced threat geometrically through engagement zones, outside which the attacker can never be neutralized by the defenders. In our approach, the attacker continuously pursues the target under nominal conditions and engages evasive maneuvers only when a defender-induced engagement boundary is approached, thereby ensuring survivability. This is achieved by blending target-interception and engagement zone avoidance behaviors through a switching-based guidance law that prioritizes safety near threats while preserving nominal interception-bound trajectory elsewhere. We further show that avoiding the engagement zone corresponding to the defender nearest to the attacker is sufficient to ensure that all engagement zones are avoided, enabling scalable and computationally efficient threat management. The proposed guidance law relies solely on relative state information, requiring no global position data or defender intent estimation, making it applicable in GPS-denied and communication-constrained environments. A Lyapunov-based analysis establishes convergence to the target and ensures forward invariance of the safe set outside all defender engagement zones, while simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the strategy in achieving mission objectives under adversarial conditions.