Practical guidance law controlling impact angle

Abstract

Impact angle is defined as the angle between the velocity vectors of a missile and a target at the instance of interception. The objective of the impact angle control guidance (IACG) law is to guide the missile into a collision course with a specified impact angle. In this paper, a new IACG law considering practical implementation is proposed. By selecting parameters properly, the proposed guidance law can be applied to various engagement situations such as the rear-chase case and the face-to-face case. On the basis of the backstepping control approach, the proposed guidance law only requires information about the impact angle, the line-of-sight rate, and the estimated time-to-go. These features improve the applicability of the proposed guidance law to the real systems. To verify the performance of the proposed guidance law, two-dimensional engagement problem is considered. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed guidance law is effective for controlling the impact angle.