Design of a new command to line-of-sight guidance law via feedback linearization technique

This paper describes the application of the recently developed feedback linearization technique to the design of a new command to line-of-sight (CLOS) guidance law for skid-to-turn (STT) missiles. The key idea lies in converting the three dimensional CLOS guidance problem to the tracking problem of a time-varying nonlinear system. Then, using a feeedback linearizing approach to tracking in nonlinear systems, we design a three dimensional CLOS guidance law that can ensure zero miss distance for a randomly maneuvering target. Our result may shed new light on the role of the feedforward acceleration terms used in the earlier CLOS guidance laws. Furthermore, we show that the new CLOS guidance law can be computationally simplified without performance degradation. This is made possible by dropping out the terms in the new CLOS guidance law, which obey the well-known matching condition.