Guidance Strategies Against Defended Aerial Targets

TLDR

The study examines a three‑body engagement where an attacking missile intercepts a target aircraft while a defender missile is launched. The authors investigate how defender missile guidance laws—proportional navigation and line‑of‑sight—affect attacking missile strategies of proportional navigation and pure pursuit. Analytical derivations, numerical simulations, and a game‑theoretic analysis are employed to evaluate launch envelopes under the different guidance strategies. Analytical launch envelopes, lateral acceleration ratios, and closed‑form expressions for missile initial position and launch angles are derived, showing high sensitivity to defender guidance and producing game‑theoretic evasion probability envelopes.

Abstract

The three-body engagement scenario is considered where an aerial missile, homing onto a target aircraft, encounters a defender missile launched by the aircraft. A given set of defender-missile guidance laws, namely, proportional navigation and line-of-sight guidance, are considered, and analysis is carried out for proportional navigation and pure pursuit attacking missile strategies. Analytic launch envelopes and lateral accelerations ratios for the four resulting scenarios are derived. Closed-form expressions for attackingmissile initial position and launch angles are derived for a successful evasion from the defender. Numerical simulations are carried out which comply with the analytical findings. The resulting launch envelopes are highly sensitive to the adversary’s guidance strategy, and thus, concerning practical implementation, a game theoretic analysis is carried out. Game solutions are obtained in pure and mixed strategies, resulting in the missile’s evasion probability envelope, that is, based on the four individual launch envelopes.