Adaptive controller for the avoidance of an unknownly guided air combat missile

An adaptive controller for the avoidance of an air combat missile utilizing a guidance law unknown to the target is introduced. The controls of the aircraft are determined at discrete instants using a receding horizon control scheme providing near-optimal feedback controls of the aircraft against a closing missile. The controls are optimized with respect to the expected final distance between the vehicles. In the controller, the target´s belief in the guidance law of the missile is represented as a discrete probability distribution over a set of guidance laws. As the missile closes on the aircraft, the probability distribution is updated on the basis of the realized vehicle trajectories using Bayesian reasoning. The controller is demonstrated with numerical examples.