Optimal and Suboptimal Guidance for a Short-Range Homing Missile

Optimal and suboptimal guidance laws for short-range homing missiles are developed and compared to the commonly mechanized quidance law of proportional navigation. The optimal controller is derived as an optimal feedback regulator; the suboptimal controller is an approximation of the optimal regulator and consists of timevarying proportional navigation plus a time-varying gain term times a calculated target acceleration. Monte Carlo studies of the three controllers show that the optimal and suboptimal controllers are much superior to proportional navigation for the case of combined constant target acceleration, line-of-sight rate noise, and missile acceleration saturation.