Model Predictive Control Based Defensive Guidance Law in Three-Body Engagement

Model predictive control (MPC) has been widely used in process industry, but its applications to missile guidance law are relatively rare. In this paper, MPC is introduced to design defensive guidance law in a three-body engagement, where a defending missile (i.e., defender) is employed to protect a target aircraft from an attacking missile. Based on nonlinear kinematic equations, an explicit linear discrete-time model is derived as the predictive model. Then the defensive guidance problem is formulated as a quadratic programming problem, and a fast algorithm for the MPC guidance law is developed. The advantages of the MPC guidance law include the applicability to scenarios with unknown guidance strategy of attacking missile, nonlinear kinematics and multiple constraints. Another key feature is that the proposed approach does not require alteration in the target maneuver. Simulation results show that the MPC guidance law works well and can meet real-time requirements.