Maritime application of ducted-fan flight array system: Decoy for anti-ship missile

This paper proposes a decoy application using a ducted-fan flight array system which consists of multiple single modules. Each single module has a conventional ducted-fan configuration and can fly individually. For the single module and the connected array, kinematic and dynamic models are briefly introduced. Based on the derived models, a control system using the sliding mode control (SMC) and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) methods is built into a hierarchical structure. Also, simple kinematics is applied for multiple anti-ship missiles (ASMs) and a target ship. A proportional navigation guidance (PNG) law is designed for the guided missile system. Furthermore, a sequential logic proposed to take account of an expected signal power (ESP) for the deployment strategy. The ESP is calculated by using seeker and decoy signal models at a control station, and then the station sends path planning commands to the multiple decoys. A numerical simulation is conducted under a visualization environment and verifies the decoy mission with two missiles and two decoys. The simulation shows that the separated single modules fulfill the role of the decoy effectively to counteract the multiple ASMs.