Adaptive Vision-based Missile Guidance in the Presence of Evasive Target Maneuvers

Abstract A nonlinear adaptive visual servo guidance law is presented for a bank-to-turn (BTT) missile airframe that achieves near zero miss distance interception of a target undergoing unknown evasive maneuvers. The controller is developed assuming unknown missile linear velocity and target depth measurements; hence can be regarded as a pure vision-based guidance law. By approximating the unknown, scaled relative velocity via power series expansion, a continuous adaptive parameter update law is developed to compensate for the unknown missile-target relative velocity and the depth measurements. In addition, robust elements are included in the guidance law to compensate for external disturbances and parameter identification errors. A rigorous Lyapunov-based stability analysis is utilized to prove uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) stability of the system states, and high-fidelity numerical simulation results are provided to verify the performance of the proposed missile guidance law.