A New Collision Control Guidance Law Based on Speed Control for Kill Vehicles

In this paper, a new guidance law for intercepting ballistic missiles at high altitude is proposed. The proposed guidance method, called collision control guidance, unlike the conventional guidance method which controls the collision triangle by adjusting the flight-path angle, achieves a collision triangle by controlling the interceptor speed. In the proposed method, a new impact point (or collision triangle) is first determined that automatically nullifies a given initial heading angle error without changing the flight-path angle. Speed control is followed until a particular time in order to reach the new impact point. In this paper, the control effectiveness and the fuel consumption of the proposed method are analyzed to provide better insight into the proposed method. It turns out that compared to existing methods the proposed method can save fuel when intercepting a high-speed target. Numerical simulations confirm the performance of the proposed method.