Three-dimensional suboptimal guidance law for fly-over and shoot-down smart ammunition via virtual target

An optimal burst height is required for the fly-over and shoot-down smart ammunition with an EFP warhead at the instant of explosion which brings a special requirement to the miss distance of the terminal guidance law. In this paper, a guidance law based on the virtual target scheme is proposed. First, the practical pursuit-evasion issue between the ammunition and the target with specific miss distance is transformed into a virtual pursuit-evasion problem with zero miss distance. Secondly, a complete three-dimensional pursuit-evasion kinematics model is established without any simplifications. And then, a suboptimal guidance law is designed based on the θ-D method which has constraints of the elevation and azimuth angular velocity of the virtual line of sight (LOS). Finally, in order to verify the performance of the proposed guidance law, three test cases are conducted. Numerical results show that under the proposed terminal guidance law, the smart ammunition not only can fly above the target with an optimal burst height but also have a smaller normal acceleration on the terminal trajectory.