V3I7P11

Enhancing the Practical Feasibility of Differential Game Guidance Laws

Nguyen Van Bang^1*

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of differential game guidance with bounded controls for missile interception against highly maneuvering targets under limited missile maneuverability. A comparative study between optimal guidance and differential game guidance is conducted using a three-state Kalman filter for state estimation in the presence of measurement noise. Four representative random target maneuvers, including uniformly distributed constant, Poisson, random weave, and random vertical-S maneuvers, are evaluated through extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The results demonstrate that differential game guidance consistently achieves smaller root-mean-square (RMS) miss distances than optimal guidance when the missile-to-target acceleration advantage is low, particularly against highly unpredictable target maneuvers. To overcome the practical limitation associated with the bang-bang nature of differential game guidance, a hybrid guidance strategy is proposed in which optimal guidance is employed during most of the engagement and differential game guidance is activated only during the terminal phase. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid approach effectively suppresses command chattering while preserving nearly all interception performance improvements of differential game guidance. The study demonstrates that hybrid differential game guidance provides a practical and robust solution for improving interception accuracy against challenging maneuvering targets under realistic guidance and measurement conditions.

Keywords:

Differential game guidance, Bounded controls, Hybrid guidance, Kalman filter, Missile guidance, Maneuvering targets, Monte Carlo simulation