Finite horizon integrated guidance and control for terminal homing in vertical plane

ONE of the most popular guidance and control design paradigms that dominated the past decades was the "separate" design principle (i.e., designing the guidance law without considering the autopilot dynamics and vice versa). By separating one from another, the designers are able to resort to the simple system dynamics with the rich and powerful theoretical results that have been intensively studied by their ancestors. Also, the guidance and control systems developed via such separation principle have proven reliable, because they have been widely applied to real-life systems over the years. This type of separated design paradigm relies on the crucial assumption that the guidance kinematics and the autopilot dynamics are spectrally separated from each other (i.e., the autopilot dynamics is much faster than the guidance kinematics). There have been some works on the optimal guidance laws assuming the simple (first- or second-order) autopilot models, however, the discrepancy from the assumed model usually results in unexpected or even divergent responses.