High-precision computational guidance in terminal phase with impact angle, lead angle and lateral acceleration constraints

Abstract

This paper proposes a high-precision three-dimensional nonlinear optimal computational guidance law in the terminal phase of an interceptor that ensures near-zero miss-distance as well as the desired impact angle. Additionally, it achieves these ambitious objectives while ensuring that the lead angle and lateral acceleration constraints are not violated throughout its trajectory. This ensures (i) the target does not escape the field of view of its seeker at any point in time (a state constraint) and (ii) it does not demand unreasonable lateral acceleration that cannot be generated (a control constraint). The guidance problem is formulated and solved using newly proposed Path-constrained Model Predictive Static Programming (PC-MPSP) framework. All constraints, both equality and inequality, are equivalently represented as linear constraints in terms of the errors in the control history, thereby reducing the complexity and dimensionality of the problem significantly. Coupled with a quadratic cost function in control, the problem is then reduced to a standard quadratic optimization problem with linear constraints, which is then solved using the computationally efficient interior-point method. Results clearly demonstrate the advantage of the proposed guidance scheme over the conventional Biased PN as well as the recently proposed GENeralized EXplicit (GENEX) guidance techniques. Numerical simulations with variation in initial conditions and Monte–Carlo simulations with parametric uncertainty demonstrate the robustness of the proposed guidance scheme.