Dual control guidance for simultaneous identification and interception

An adaptive dual control guidance algorithm is presented for intercepting a moving target in the presence of an interfering target (decoy) in a stochastic environment. Two sequences of measurements are obtained at discrete points in time; however, it is not certain, which sequence came from the target of interest and which from the decoy. Associated with each track, the interceptor also receives noisy, state dependent feature measurements. The optimum control for the interceptor which is given by the solution of the stochastic dynamic programming equation is not numerically feasible to obtain. An approximate solution of this equation is obtained by evaluating the value of the future information gathering. This is done through the use of preposterior analysis - approximate prior probability densities are obtained and used to describe the future learning and control. In this way, the interceptor control is used for information gathering in order to reduce the future target and decoy inertial measurement errors and enhance the observable target/decoy feature differences for subsequent discrimination between the true target and the decoy. Simulation studies have shown the effectiveness of the scheme.