Integration of imaging seeker control in a visually guided missile

This paper addresses the modeling and control of a gimballed imaging seeker in a visually guided missile in 3D head-on engagements against a maneuvering target. A 2-DOF rate gyro and a camera are mounted on the inner gimbal. Target segmentation is considered solved and visual information is the location and velocity of the target centroid in the image plane. Visual feed forward directly to the canards obviates the conventional stability augmentation loop. Closed-loop control of the seeker was integrated with a realistic model of a missile to investigate the synergism between relevant subsystems such as image processing, seeker controller and missile guidance. Homing accuracy is examined under unfavorable initial conditions, torquer saturation, seeker and canard constraints, rate gyro random drift and bias, gimbal potentiometer noise, optical geometric distortions and image segmentation errors. The results indicate the effectiveness of feed forward visual homing.