Target acceleration modeling for tactical missile guidance

For future short-range air-to-air missile concepts, it has been demonstrated that linear optimal guidance laws provide significant performance improvements over proportional navigation guidance laws. This paper addresses the critical problem of estimating the missile-to-target position, velocity, and acceleration (required by the linear optimal guidance law) when only passive (angle only) seeker information is available onboard a highly maneuverable bank-to-turn missile concept. More specifically, the problem is how to model the target acceleration to achieve improved missile performance. Four target acceleration models coupled with an extended Kalman filter are presented and evaluated on a six-degree-of-freedom missile simulation to determine their estimation effectiveness and their influence on missile guidance.