Differential games missile guidance with bearings-only measurements

Abstract

The implementation of missile guidance laws on collision course trajectories with bearings-only measurements may result in bad range observability. This in turn may result in poor engagement performance for those guidance algorithms that exploit range information in their steering law. Maneuvering away from the collision course trajectory improves range observability. To propose a sizing criterion for this maneuver, this work presents a new guidance strategy that exploits the information from the error covariance matrix of the homing loop integrated Kalman filter in the framework of a pursuit-evasion game. The new strategy has been tested in several scenarios against other guidance laws, such as the classical formulation of the pursuit-evasion game and proportional navigation. Numerical simulations on a set of Monte Carlo samples show that the proposed solution is able to improve engagement performance in terms of both miss distance and range observability.