Homing Missile Guidance and Control at JHU/APL

1
Homing Missile Guidance and Control at JHU/APL

• SAE Aerospace Control Guidance Systems
  Committee Meeting 97
• March 1-3, 2006

Uday J. Shankar, Ph. D. Air Missile Defense
Department 240-228-8037 uday.shankar_at_jhuapl.edu
2
Abstract
This presentation discusses the GNC research at
the Guidance, Navigation, and Control Group at
the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory. Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is one of five
institutions at the Johns Hopkins University.
APL is a not-for-profit research organization
with about 3600 employees (68 scientists and
engineers). Our annual revenue is on the order
of 670m. The Air and Missile Defense Department
is a major department of APL involved with the
defense of naval and joint forces from attacking
aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic
missiles. The major thrust of the GNC group is
the guidance, navigation, and control of
missiles. Our mission is to Integrate sensor
data, airframe and propulsion capabilities to
meet mission objectives. We are involved with
GNC activities in the concept stage (design,
requirements analysis, algorithm development),
detailed design (hardware, software), and flight
test (pre-flight predictions, post-flight
analysis, failure investigation). The Advanced
Systems section within the GNC group is involved
with several projects boost-phase interception
of ballistic missiles, discrimination-coupled
guidance for midcourse intercepts, Standard
Missile GNC engineering, Kill Vehicle
engineering, integrated guidance control,
swarm-on-swarm guidance, and rapid prototyping of
GNC algorithms and hardware. We discuss two
examples. The first is the swarm-on-swarm
guidance. This framework can be used to solve
guidance problems associated with several missile
defense scenarios. The second is the application
of dynamic-game guidance solutions. This has
applications in terminal guidance of a
boost-phase interceptor and the
discrimination-coupled guidance of terminal
homing of a midcourse interceptor. We discuss in
more detail the problem of terminal guidance of a
boost-phase interceptor. The problem is
formulated and a closed-form solution is offered.
3
Divisions ofThe Johns Hopkins University
School of Arts Sciences Whiting School of
Engineering School of Professional Studies in
Business Education
School of Hygiene Public Health School of
Medicine School of Nursing
Applied Physics Laboratory
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
Peabody Institute
4
Profile of theApplied Physics Laboratory

• Not-for-profit university research development
  laboratory
• Division of the Johns Hopkins University founded
  in 1942
• On-site graduate engineering program in 8 degree
  fields
• Staffing 3,600 employees
  (68 scientists engineers)
• Annual revenue 670M

5
Air Missile DefenseAdvancing Readiness
Effectiveness of US Military Forces

• Key Programs
• Cooperative Engagement Capability
• Ballistic Missile Defense
• Standard Missile
• AEGIS
• Area Air Defense Commander
• Ship Self Defense

Critical Challenge 1 Defend naval joint forces
from opposing aircraft, cruise missiles, and
ballistic missiles Critical Challenge 2
Optimally deploy employ multiple weapons
systems to maximize defense of critical assets
such as military forces, civilian population
centers, airfields ports in overseas theaters
in the United States
6
GNC Group Roles
GPS
Other Sensors
Guidance Navigation Solution
Guidance Law
Flight Control
Airframe/ Propulsion
Missile Seeker
Target Motion
Primary Responsibilities
Missile Motion
Cooperative Efforts
Autopilot Loop
Inertial Sensors
Homing Loop
Primary responsibility for seeker dynamics and
radome effects
7
GNC Group Current Efforts
8
Example GNC Research at APL
9
Cooperative Multi-Interceptor Guidance

• Swarm-Guidance Expected Benefits
• Eased centralized control requirements
• - Remove chokepoints, delays, etc.
• Reactive flexibility / adaptation to threats
• Scalability (response insensitive to s)
• Near-simultaneous swarm negation
• Minimize chaotic threat response to being engaged
• Rapid battle-damage assessment and 2nd-salvo
  response

Swarm-guidance Guide multiple cooperative
missile interceptors to negate one or more
incoming threats (Swarm-on-swarm)
10
Ballistic Missile Defense Challenges
Information uncertainty coupled with time and
kinematic limitations pose substantial challenges
to ballistic missile defense
11
Boost-Phase BMD Terminal Homing

• Improve guidance law zero-effort-miss estimation
  accuracy
• This improves KV ?V and g-efficiency
• Assume that the threat acceleration increases
  linearly
• Improve on the APN concept versus a boosting
  threat
• Solve a dynamic-game (DG) optimization
  formulation
• DG framework provides robustness to threat
  acceleration uncertainty
• Couples the control components of the guidance
  problem to estimation and prediction quality
• Control is less sensitive to threat acceleration
  uncertainties
• Accommodating threat burnout
• Employ a burnout detection cue (from the seeker)
• Use in estimation and guidance algorithms
• Derive closed-form solutions
• Prefer closed-form solutions to numerical
  solutions

12
BPI Terminal Guidance Solution
13
Thank You!