Weaving Guidance for Missile Observability Enhancement

This paper proposes a new optimal guidance law to enhance the target observability. Based on the observability criteria with respect to the line-of-sight rate, a weaving maneuver is suggested to increase the variation of the line-of-sight angle and to intercept the target. The proposed guidance law is derived analytically in the optimal framework with augmenting virtual states to induce the weaving maneuver. The role of virtual states is investigated by obtaining the closed-form solution of the missile trajectory and by analyzing the effect of the number and intitial values of the virtual states. Improvements in the observability are also validated by the performance of estimation. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.