Model Predictive Control Based Defensive Guidance Law in Three-Body Engagement

Model predictive control(MPC)has been widely used in process industry,but its appli-cations to missile guidance law are relatively rare.In this paper,MPC is introduced to design defen-sive guidance law in a three-body engagement,where a defending missile(i.e.,defender)is employed to protect a target aircraft from an attacking missile.Based on nonlinear kinematic equa-tions,an explicit linear discrete-time model is derived as the predictive model.Then the defensive guidance problem is formulated as a quadratic programming problem,and a fast algorithm for the MPC guidance law is developed.The advantages of the MPC guidance law include the applicabil-ity to scenarios with unknown guidance strategy of attacking missile,nonlinear kinematics and mul-tiple constraints.Another key feature is that the proposed approach does not require alteration in the target maneuver.Simulation results show that the MPC guidance law works well and can meet real-time requirements.