A spreader acceleration guidance scheme for command guided surface-to-air missiles

A novel guidance law for command-guided surface-to-air missiles is presented which attempts to reduce the integral control effort while at the same time taking into account the maneuvers of the target. In the process, the proposed law achieves some improvements in interception times and miss distances. A Monte Carlo simulation of a missile-target engagement in an inclined plane is carried out to check the performance of the proposed guidance law in comparison with existing laws in terms of integral control effort, interception time, and miss distance. The proposed method suffers from the obvious drawback of having to estimate the target acceleration, unlike the PN (proportional navigation) guidance law. It also needs somewhat higher time for computations (unlike PN). This is the reason for proposing this guidance law in a command guidance mode, since powerful ground based computers will be available to carry out the iterations