Optimal Fixed - Interval Integrated Guidance - Control Laws for Hit - to - Kill Missiles

Due to their potential for reducing the weapon size and efficiency, design methods for realizing hitto-kill capabilities in missile systems are of significant research interest in the missile flight control community. As defined in this paper, hit-tokill capability requires the missile to consistently achieve point-mass miss distances less than half the minimum dimension of the target. It has been noted in the literature that the chief contributors to the miss distance in homing missiles are the seeker errors, autopilot lag, target maneuvers, and target state estimation lag. Guidance laws for ameliorating the effects of each of these miss distance components have been discussed in several recent publications. The present research addresses the hit-to-kill missile flight control problem by casting it as an integrated guidance-control problem. By including the complete dynamics of the missile, the integrated guidance-control formulation automatically compensates for the impact of the autopilot lag on the miss distance. The resulting finite-interval control problem is then solved using a transformation approach. Interception by a kinetic warhead is used as an example to illustrate the performance of the integrated guidance-control law.