Optical Kalamn filtering for missile guidance

Abstract

Optical systolic array processors represent a powerful and general-purpose set of optical architectures with high computational rates. A new application (Kalman filtering) for such architectures is investigated: all required operations are detailed, their realization by optical and special-purpose analog electronics are specified; and the processing time of the system is quantified. The specific Kalman filter application chosen is an air-to-air missile guidance controller. The goal was to realize a fully-adaptive Kalman filter to allow a new measurement every 1msec. This work also addresses the vital issue of flow and pipelining of data and operations in a systolic array processor. Our work is sufficiently general to be applicable to an optical or digital systolic array processor realization.Optical systolic array processors represent a powerful and general-purpose set of optical architectures with high computational rates. A new application (Kalman filtering) for such architectures is investigated: all required operations are detailed, their realization by optical and special-purpose analog electronics are specified; and the processing time of the system is quantified. The specific Kalman filter application chosen is an air-to-air missile guidance controller. The goal was to realize a fully-adaptive Kalman filter to allow a new measurement every 1msec. This work also addresses the vital issue of flow and pipelining of data and operations in a systolic array processor. Our work is sufficiently general to be applicable to an optical or digital systolic array processor realization.