High-Altitude Terminal Control of Anti-Air Missiles with a Terminal Booster and Front Lateral Impulse Thrusters

We propose a high-altitude terminal control scheme for anti-air missiles that uses a terminal booster and one-off front lateral impulse thrusters. The terminal booster does not have an actuator such as thrust vector control, and the front lateral thrusters are cheaper and simpler than the Divert Attitude Control System while providing a faster response than aerodynamic control at high altitudes. The proposed scheme includes a quaternion-based vector-oriented control technique and a firing logic for the front lateral thrusters. The control technique calculates the moment command to track the thrust vector command converted from the acceleration command, which has the advantage that a singularity of Euler angles does not occur. Then, the firing logic using a greedy algorithm selects which unexpired front lateral thrusters to fire so that the direction and magnitude of the moment command can be tracked as closely as possible for the inevitable error due to the discreteness of the front lateral thrusters. Simulations of high-altitude engagement of moving targets were conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed scheme.