Guidance to Collision of a Variable-Speed Missile

Proportional Navigation (PN), the most used guidance law for short range homing missiles, is based on the asumption that missile speed is constant. However, the speed of a highly maneuverable modern missile varies considerably during flight, and the performance of PN is far from being satisfactory in that case. In this article we define a new guidance law that steers the heading of a variable-speed missile to a straight line collision course. The performance improvement of the missile using the new guidance law as compared to PN is demonstrated by simulation.