Model predictive guidance for active aircraft protection from a homing missile

This paper proposes a novel guidance law based on model predictive control for protecting an aircraft from a homing missile. Considering that in the target‐missile‐defender engagement the attacking missile is pursuing the target aircraft by employing a known linear guidance law, a non‐linear predictive model for the engagement is established. This predictive model allows converting the three‐body engagement to a one‐on‐one engagement. The time‐to‐go for the defender towards the future position of the incoming missile is analytically derived, indicating that the optimal time for the defender to intercept the incoming missile is a fixed‐point of a real‐valued function. As a result, the optimal interception duration can be obtained by a standard fixed‐point iteration method, and thus the interception point can be readily predicted via integrating the predictive model. The guidance command is generated by directly leading the defender to the predicted intercept point. Numerical simulations in different scenarios validate the algorithm to be computationally efficient, and demonstrate that the proposed strategy outperforms previous techniques in terms of miss distance, engagement duration, and the control effort.