Empirical virtual sliding target guidance law design: an aerodynamic approach

We present a novel empirical virtual sliding target (VST) guidance law for the midcourse phase of a long range surface-to-air missile that uses the simplicity of the conventional proportional navigation (PN) guidance law while exploiting the aerodynamic characteristics of a missile's flight through the atmosphere to enable the missile to achieve superior performance than that achieved by conventional PN guidance laws. The missile trajectory emulates the trajectory of an optimal control based guidance law formulated on a realistic aerodynamic model of the missile-target engagement. The trajectory of the missile is controlled by controlling the speed of a virtual target that slides towards a predicted intercept point during the midcourse phase. Several sliding schemes, both linear and nonlinear, are proposed and the effect of the variation of the sliding parameters, which control the sliding speed of the virtual target, on the missile performance, are examined through extensive simulations that take into account the atmospheric characteristics as well as limitations on the missile in terms of the energy available and lateral acceleration limits. Launch envelopes for these sliding schemes for approaching and receding targets are also obtained. These results amply demonstrate the superiority of the proposed guidance law over the conventional PN law.