Kalman Filtering for Improvement Surface-to-Air Missile Guidance

Homing missiles are classified as Surface-to-air missiles. These missiles are used for air targets like airplane or helicopter combat. To counteract these missiles, fighter aircrafts use pseudo targets to deviate the course of the missiles. These pseudo targets in the form of Flyer Decoys, Jamming or Clutter are effective means to disable such missiles. In early versions of guidance systems, missiles turn-off their guidance systems temporarily. This can help in limited situations. However, in this paper an advanced guidance system based on Extended Kalman Filters is proposed. It is shown that using the estimated values of the variables from Kalman Filter, can modify the course of missile fight leading to the target. Due to the bearing-only nature of the system, it shown that initial conditions are very important in the estimation process. To reduce the effect of initial conditions, a set of Extended Kalman Filter is introduced. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.