An Investigation of Interceptor Guidance Methods through Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

During the past half century, proportional navigation (PN) has been the de facto standard for guiding numerous types of missiles that track moving targets such as ships or aircraft. Angular acceleration guidance (AAG) is a relatively new guidance method that seeks to achieve better performance against targets with non-constant velocity. In general, AAG causes the interceptor to take a more direct route towards the interception point resulting in faster intercepts that expend less energy. The PN method, though slower and more costly, demonstrated more robustness to the initial conditions and yielded a higher rate of success. To capitalize on the predictive behavior of AAG and the robustness of PN, a hybrid solution was created where the interceptor's guidance system used AAG initially and switched to PN during the endgame. The proximity to the target determined when the switch occurred. Numerical simulations reveal that this hybrid method increases the number of successful intercepts compared to the AAG-only solution while significantly reducing the energy costs and intercept time compared to the equivalent PN intercept.