Kinetic optimal midcourse guidance law for air-to-air missiles

A new kinetic optimal midcourse guidance law is derived based on optimal control formulation. A new simplified Runge-Kutta grade numerical method is proposed to find the optimal trajectory. Real data of an air-to-air missile is referred to for comparing results using the kinetic optimal midcourse guidance law with those under both the kinematic optimal guidance law and singular perturbation sub-optimal guidance law, wherein the latter two laws are modified in this paper by adding a vertical g-bias command to each law for the sake of trajectory shaping. Simulation results show that using the new kinetic optimal midcourse guidance law can help save energy and maximize terminal velocity effectively.