A Monte Carlo Computation of the Firing Envelope of a Visually Guided Missile: Integrated Guidance, Control and Image Processing Algorithms

Missile design is often separated into distinct subsystems such as seeker stabilization, target detection and tracking, guidance, and autopilot. The miss distance strongly depends on proper integration of those critical subsystems and the prototyping of visually guided missiles. A low-cost integrated solution based on a PC running Matlab is an attractive option to test new ideas on guidance, control and image processing algorithms. A bottom-up image synthesis of a missile homing in on a target embedded in a planar background was used in an integrated project that evaluates the different missile subsystems. This paper obtains the firing envelope of a visually homing missile encompassing dynamics and constraints of the missile seeker, canards, non linear motion equations, sensor errors, image processing for target detection and tracking, and proportional navigation guidance. For a given realistic simulation scenario, the main result concerns the influence of a correlation-based detection algorithm on the firing envelope obtained when the target centroid is always detected and without uncertainty. Results showed that the detection algorithm distorts the original firing envelope due to its enormous dependency on the choice of the signature mask size. Moreover, for the chosen launching geometry, missile angular motion was much less significant to miss distance degradation than inadequate mask sizing.