New guidance filter structure for homing missiles with strapdown IIR seeker

For implementing the proportional navigation guidance law on passive homing missiles equipped with strapdown imaging infrared seekers, the line-of-sight angles and rates with respect to the inertial frame should be estimated by carefully handling the parasitic instability effect due to the seeker’s latency. By introducing a new state vector representation along with the Pade approximation for compensating the time-delay of the seeker, this paper proposes a new guidance filter structure, stochastic dynamic models and measurement equations, in three-dimensional homing problem. Then, it derives the line-of-sight angle and rate estimator in general two-dimensional engagement by applying the extended Kalman filter to the proposed structure. The estimation performance and the characteristics of the proposed filter were evaluated via a series of numerical experiments.