V3I7P32

An Adaptive Terminal Guidance Law with Target Maneuver Compensation for Surface-to-Air Missile Interception of High-Agility UAVs 

Kieu Tien Dung*¹

Abstract

The increasing use of high-agility unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in modern aerial operations presents significant challenges for conventional surface-to-air missile guidance systems. Traditional proportional navigation (PN) and augmented proportional navigation (APN) guidance laws often experience degraded interception performance against highly maneuvering UAVs due to their limited capability to adapt to rapidly changing target dynamics. This paper proposes an adaptive terminal guidance law that integrates target maneuver compensation with an adaptive navigation gain to improve interception accuracy during the terminal engagement phase. The proposed approach estimates the target maneuver in real time using a nonlinear state estimation framework and incorporates the estimated maneuver directly into the guidance command. Meanwhile, the navigation gain is continuously adjusted according to the engagement geometry and target motion, enabling the guidance law to balance interception accuracy and control effort under varying combat conditions. The stability of the proposed guidance strategy is analyzed, and its performance is evaluated through numerical simulations involving multiple high-agility UAV maneuver scenarios and measurement uncertainties. Comparative simulations against conventional PN and APN guidance laws demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces terminal miss distance and control oscillations while maintaining robust interception performance under aggressive target maneuvers. The proposed guidance framework provides a practical and computationally efficient solution for enhancing the terminal interception capability of modern surface-to-air missile systems against maneuvering UAV threats.

Keywords:

Surface-to-air missile, terminal guidance, unmanned aerial vehicle, adaptive guidance law, maneuver compensation, proportional navigation, state estimation, missile guidance.