A missile guidance law tolerant to unestimated evasive maneuvers

Abstract

Purpose This note aims to introduce a terminal guidance law that is able to compensate for evasive target maneuvers without estimating their acceleration. Design/methodology/approach The new guidance law is derived in the framework of linear-quadratic optimal control to ensure interception with minimum energy even in the presence of a target maneuver. Findings An explicit closed-form expression for the missile acceleration command is provided, which turns out to be a non-trivial extension of proportional navigation guidance. Simulation results against evasive maneuvers of various intensities are provided to compare the new law to classical ones and thus show the benefits of the proposed approach. Originality/value The proposed guidance law was not reported so far in the literature and provides a simple way to deal with evasive maneuvers.