A Three Dimensional Guidance and Control Method for Suicide UAV and the Flight Test Verification

Suicide UAV has the characteristics of long-term cruise for reconnaissance as an aircraft, and high-speed penetration attack as a missile. In order to give full play to its combat advantages, it is necessary to study the guidance and control method suitable for its dynamic characteristics in the process of terminal attack. A Three Dimensional (3D) guidance and control method for suicide UAV is proposed in this paper. The dynamics of the UAV in 3D space is decoupled into the movement in two orthogonal planes, and the proportional navigation (PN) law is applied to the longitudinal channel and the lateral channel, respectively. The guidance loop, outer loop and inner loop controllers are designed based on the idea of successive loop closure. A series of flight tests are carried out to verify the algorithm. It shows that the control commands of each loop are correctly tracked in the whole process of the attack. Different diving angles as well as the introduction of large yaw angles do not affect the miss-distance of target striking. The UAV hit the target accurately in all of the tests, and the miss distance was less than 0.5m. The control system of the aircraft can track the guidance command quickly and accurately, which indicates that the coordination between guidance and control loop is very well.