A generalized design method for three-dimensional guidance laws

The true proportional navigation guidance law, the augmented proportional navigation guidance law, or the adaptive sliding-mode guidance law, is designed based on the planar target-to-missile relative motion dynamics. By a proper construction of a nonlinear Lyapunov function for the line-of-sight angular rates in the three-dimensional guidance dynamics, it is shown that the three guidance laws mentioned above are able to ensure the asymptotic convergence of the angular rates as they are directly applied to the three-dimensional guidance environment. Furthermore, considering the missile autopilot dynamics as a first-order lag, we design three-dimensional nonlinear guidance laws by using the backstepping technique for three cases: (1) the target does not maneuver; (2) the information of target acceleration can be acquired; and (3) the target acceleration is not available but its bound is known a priori. In the first step of the backstepping design of the control law, there is no need to cancel the nonlinear coupling terms in the three-dimensional guidance dynamics in such way that the final expressions of the proposed guidance laws are significantly simplified. Thus, the proposed nonlinear Lyapunov function for the line-of-sight angular rates is a generalized function for designing three-dimensional guidance laws. Simulation results of a missile interception mission show that the proposed guidance laws are highly effective.