Evolving homing guidance configuration with Cramer Rao Bound

This paper advocates the use of Cramer Rao Bound (CRB) as a tool to aid decisions on guidance system configuration for homing missiles. It is argued that the CRB provides a quantitative understanding of the influence of model parameters and instrumentation/signal processing capabilities of the tracking filter performance, without going into the specifics of filter design and elaborate Monte Carlo performance analysis. The concepts have been demonstrated by a bearing only target-tracking (BOT) problem. The CRB performance for position and velocity error has been studied with respect to (i) variation of the sampling time, (ii) simplistic change in the measurement noise variance, (iii) the effect of introducing additional measurement with different noise variances, (iv) the effect of eclipsing on measurement The example demonstrates that the CRB analysis provides a good handle for tracking system design trade off. The situations where CRB results may mislead are also indicated.