Flight-Path Angle Control for Cutoff Insensitive Guidance

A cutoff insensitive guidance scheme is proposed for strategic missile systems not equipped with thrust termination systems. The main idea behind this scheme is to manipulate the current flight-path angle to follow the required flight-path angle. For this, a routine to obtain the required flight-path angle is set up by reorganizing the equations comprising the Lambert routine. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is more robust to motor performance uncertainty; it is also simpler and has a lighter calculation load. It is shown that the algorithm has good performance through the computer simulation.