Effects of High Order Sliding Mode Guidance and Observers On Hit-to-Kill Interceptions

Abstract

Maneuvering targets present challenges to missile design in the areas of sensor, tracker, flight control, lethality systems, missile systems integration, and in the design of guidance, navigation, and control algorithms in particular. Classical Proportional Navigation (PN) and Augmented PN (APN) work against a wide range of targets including some maneuvering targets. However for robustness these algorithms require the interceptor to have a maneuver advantage over the target of at least 3:1. The effects of smooth second order sliding mode guidance laws, and second order sliding mode observers/differentiators on hit-to-kill interceptions are studied in this paper. It also explores the effects of using sliding mode guidance with Kalman filtering, sliding mode guidance with sliding mode observers/differentiators, and classical PN with sliding mode observers/differentiators. Sliding mode observers/differentiators dramatically reduce the complexity of target state estimation. The algorithms presented here have been verified using the high fidelity Phoenix six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) developed at Radiance Technologies.