Coning motion instability of spinning missiles induced by the delay of strap-down seeker

The strap-down seeker, which combines the seeker’s and the onboard gyro’s measurements to obtain the target information, has been extensively applied by spinning missiles. The response delay of the strap-down seeker, a novel factor that could result in crosscoupling between the acceleration commands in the pitch and yaw channels and subsequently cause the significant deterioration in dynamic stability of the spinning missile equipped with a rate loop, is noted in this paper. The sufficient and necessary stability conditions are also analytically established based on the system equation with complex coefficient, which are further verified by numerical simulations. It could be indicated that the response delay of the strap-down seeker will greatly deteriorate the dynamic stability of the whole guidance system designed by the conventional method. It is also noticed from analysis that the stable region of the combined guidance coefficient is shrunken significantly with the increase of the spinning rate.