Maneuvering target estimation for the optimal guidance law of intercepting missiles

It is very challenging for missiles to precisely intercept maneuvering targets. The existing methods for designing guidance laws usually did not sufficiently take the maneuvering of targets into consideration. This study designed an extended Kalman filter to estimate the parameters of maneuvering targets based on the information measured by phased array radar seekers. Furthermore, an optimal guidance law was derived with the estimated parameters of a maneuvering target. Our proposed methods were simulated under typical intercept conditions. The simulation results demonstrated that the precise intercept can be achieved by our derived optimal guidance law with the maneuvering target state estimated by our designed extended Kalman filter.