Guidance and Navigation System Design For a Ship Self Defense Missile

This paper describes the design and performance evaluation of a ship self defense missile. The missile airframe characteristics and the guidance and navigation system requirements needed to accomplish the mission are discussed. A missile guidance law design that achieves the objectives of small miss distance and a required terminal impact angle is demonstrated. The IMU and navigation system requirements necessary to guarantee a high probability of target acquisition by a strapdown, narrow field-of-view, infrared seeker are determined. It is shown that an accurate GPS-aided IMU system on the ship can transfer alignment and calibrate out navigation initialization errors for the missile before launch. As a result, a low cost Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) IMU from the Army Common Guidance development program is shown to be adequate for the missile. The study determines that the more accurate DIGNU-3 IMU can meet all missile requirements even under conservative navigation error assumptions. If required, GPS in-flight navigation updates could be used to allow successful missile operation with much less accurate IMUs.