Missile Guidance Laws Based on Singular Perturbation Methodology

Abstract

Air-to-air missile guidance laws pose significant design issues of effectiveness, complexity, and real-time computation requirements, particularly when they are designed for use against maneuvering targets. Conventional homing and proportional navigation (pro nav) guidance laws are simple and require minimal computation. These approaches are, however, not generally effective against maneuvering targets, leading to launch envelopes of reduced size. Guidance laws based on optimal control theory may minimize the miss distance, but the resulting optimization problem is complex and difficult to implement in real time. The singular perturbation approach described in this paper provides 1) an approximate method to solve the optimal problem and 2) a basis to relate this solution to conventional and pro nav control laws'. Physical properties of missiles, targets, and engagement scenarios are explicitly considered in this paper to maximize the accuracy of a guidance law based on singular perturbation methodology.