New optimal guidance laws for ground-to-air missiles handle time-varying acceleration limits
Missiles now smarter about when to maneuver as acceleration drops with altitude.
A new paper from researchers Or Nahum and Vitaly Shaferman (arXiv:2606.15105) introduces optimal guidance laws that explicitly account for time-varying acceleration bounds in ground-to-air missile engagements. Conventional approaches either ignore acceleration limits or apply soft constraints, which can lead to saturation at high altitude and poor interception accuracy. The proposed method embeds hard acceleration command limits directly into a linear-quadratic optimal-control framework, handling both zero-order and first-order missile dynamics with arbitrary-order linear target dynamics.
Unlike constant-bound cases, the time-varying nature allows an initial unsaturated interval where the guidance law can anticipate future saturation and reshape the acceleration profile. This means the missile maneuvers earlier, when it has greater low-altitude maneuverability, fundamentally changing the optimal solution structure. In nonlinear simulations, the new laws demonstrated substantially reduced miss distances compared to unbounded or softly constrained guidance, with less tuning required. The 38-page paper includes 10 figures and has been submitted for journal publication.
- Accounts for decreasing acceleration as missile climbs, preventing saturation and large miss distances
- Uses linear-quadratic optimal control with hard acceleration constraints, unlike conventional soft constraints
- Enables earlier, more effective maneuvers at low altitude, improving interception performance in simulations
Why It Matters
Smarter missile guidance could drastically improve air defense effectiveness against agile threats at range.