A study of autonomous evasive planar-maneuver against proportional-navigation guidance missiles for unmanned aircraft

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have shown themselves to be highly useful for Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Currently UAVs are remotely piloted, meaning they may not effectively execute defensive maneuvers when they suddenly confront a threat, i.e. an incoming missile. This paper analyzes basic defensive maneuvers of a fixed wing UAV which could be used for autonomous responses against missiles guided with a proportional navigation (PN) guidance law. The information on positions and velocities of the aircraft and missile are used in the determination of effective evasive maneuver characteristics. Numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of developed method.