Meeting the challenges of modern interceptor guidance by non-conventional approaches
The challenge of intercepting threats with non conventional warheads, the major drive for the development of ballistic missile defense systems since the first Gulf War of 1991, became even more serious when the reentry vehicles were assumed to be capable of maneuvering. Successful interception of such targets, requiring very small miss distances, cannot be guaranteed by the classical guidance and estimation methods that have been used against manned aircraft. Future interceptor guidance strategy has to be based on pursuit-evasion game concepts and the estimator design has to be integrated with the guidance law. Following such non conventional approaches has the potential to achieve the requirement of hit-to-kill accuracy against randomly maneuvering threats.
Estimation and guidance for manoeuvring targets
The rigorous development in the field of highly manoeuvrable threats gives a huge platform to find the efficient integrated estimation and guidance algorithms. In the present day technology, various kinds of threats are getting advanced day by day. For example ballistic missiles with time varying parameters or low flying cruise missile. Successful intercepting these kinds of highly manoeuvrable targets demands high performance at the end phase. Achieving zero miss distance is a challenge in case of highly manoeuvrable targets. In this paper one of the efficient estimation technique Kalman filtering and guidance algorithm, two dimensional Proportional Navigation law are discussed. Future work of this research is detailed.
On the need for integrated estimation/guidance design for hit-to-kill accuracy
Separate designs of the estimator and the guidance law of an interceptor missile are, at best, suboptimal. This paper describes an innovative first step towards an integrated design. In order to cope with random target maneuvers, a set of feasible random maneuvers is selected. For each maneuver, a suitable estimator/guidance law combination is designed. The interception endgame is divided into two phases. During the initial phase, the actual target maneuver model is identified and a suitable estimator/guidance law combination is used in the terminal phase. The innovative feature of the new approach, tested by Monte Carlo simulations of a planar benchmark scenario, is the explicit use of the time-to-go information in the selection of the estimator/guidance law combination.