93-131

Ideal Proportional Navigation

Pin-Jar Yuan and Jeng-Shing Chern*

Abstract

Proportional navigation has been proved to be a useful guidance technique in several surface-to-air and air-to-air homing systems for interception or airborne targets. Besides the familiar pure, true, and generalized proportional navigation guidance laws, a new guidance scheme. named ideal proportional navigation with commanded ac- celeration applied in the direction normal to the relative velocity be-tween interceptor and target, is presented. In this study, the closed-form solutions of ideal proportional navigation are completely derived for maneuvering and non-maneuvering target and some important characteristics related to the system performance are introduced and investigated. Under this scheme, the capture criterion is related to the effective proportional navigation constant only, no matter what the initial condition and target maneuver are. With some more cost or energy consumption, this new guidance scheme has a larger capture area and is much more effective than previous ones.

*Senior Scientist. Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology, P O Box 90008-6-7, Lungtan, Taiwan 32526, Republic of China