Generalized time-to-go inversion guidance with impact time and angle constraints

Abstract

A major challenge in homing guidance is that accurately predicting the time to go for missiles is generally difficult, which limits the practical application of a certain class of guidance laws with impact-time constraints or cooperative capabilities. To address this issue, a generalized method referred to as the time-to-go inversion guidance is presented, where the time to go is first specified as an explicit function and then the corresponding guidance law is inversely derived. By employing this new method, a variety of guidance laws and their globally accurate time-to-go solutions can be developed, regardless of whether the impact-angle constraint is considered or not. Different from all existing studies, the proposed method addresses the problem of time-to-go estimation without relying on any linearizing approximations or numerical iterations. To enhance the practicality of the proposed method, it is augmented with bias commands to result in either the impact time control guidance law or the impact time and angle control guidance law. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the higher accuracy, larger feasible solution region, and lower computational demand of the proposed guidance laws even for the missiles with nonconstant speeds.