Unified approach to missile guidance laws: a 3D extension

Since the proportional navigation guidance law was first introduced, many of the researchers had proposed different methodologies to investigate the corresponding performances of all the existing guidance laws. Even though a unified approach was proposed a few years ago, other authors found that under the proposed framework, all the existing guidance laws, namely ideal proportional navigation (IPN), true proportional navigation (TPN), and pure proportional navigation (PPN), were indeed special cases of the mentioned general guidance law. However, the results were restricted to two-dimensional space. In this paper, the author not only extends the results to three-dimensional space, but also to general IPN (GIPN), general TPN (GTPN), and PPN. Unlike conventional researchers, a modified polar coordinate (MPC) is adopted. It is shown that with the property of this MPC, for the line of sight (LOS) based guidance laws (GIPN and GTPN) the number of differential equations required to fully describe the relative dynamics can be reduced from six to three, however, for the missile's velocity-based guidance law, i.e., PPN, five differential equations are required. All the terms of differential equations involve only products and additions of variables. For all the mentioned guidance laws in this paper, only two transformed variables are required to describe the capture region, while the third variable is required to provide the condition of finite turn rate.