A Hybrid Guidance Law for a Strapdown Seeker to Maintain Lock-on Conditions against High Speed Targets

Abstract

This paper proposes a new guidance law, which considers the Field of View (FOV) of the seeker when a missile has a strapdown seeker mounted instead of a gimbal seeker. When a strapdown seeker, which has a narrow FOV, is used for tracking a target, the FOV of the seeker is an important consideration for guidance performance metrics such as miss distance. We propose a new guidance law called hybrid guidance (HG) to address the shortcomings of conventional guidance laws such as proportional navigation guidance (PNG), which cannot maintain lock-on conditions against high speed targets due to the narrow FOV of the strapdown seeker. The aim of the HG law is to null miss distance and to maintain the look angle within the FOV of the strapdown seeker. In order to achieve this goal, we combine two guidance laws in the HG law. One is a PNG law to null the LOS rate, and the other is a sliding mode guidance (SMG) law derived to keep the look angle within the FOV by employing a Lyapunov-like function with a sliding mode control methodology. We also propose a method to switch these two guidance laws at certain look angles for better guidance performance.