A Climb-and-dive Guidance Law with the Altitude Constraint

To improve the penetration probability of missiles against air defense systems and enhance the lethal effect of the warhead on the target, a climb-and-dive guidance law, which satisfies the altitude constraint subject to the impact angle constraint, is proposed in this paper. First, the altitude of the trajectory is shaped as a nicely designed function with respect to the cross range in rectangular coordinates. Then, the guidance command is obtained inversely by calculating the curvature radius from the trajectory equation. In addition, the maximum altitude of the trajectory can be simply adjusted by a guidance parameter. Moreover, to guarantee the precision of the guidance, the widely used closed-loop guidance law is developed. Compared with some published guidance laws that can address the impact angle control problem, a noticeable superiority of the proposed guidance law is the ability to control the altitude under the impact angle constraint. The validity and merits of the proposed climb-and-dive guidance law are verified through a series of numerical simulations.