Geometric Approach to Lateral Guidance for Reentry Vehicle

Abstract

In this article, we study the lateral guidance problem for a hypersonic reentry vehicle. More specifically, we propose a geometric solution to the lateral corridor that will help to achieve a tradeoff between bank reversal frequency and corridor safety. As is well known, lateral corridor determines the boundary of bank angle and its configuration reflects the timing of reversals, and the most salient challenge is how to formulate the corridor accurately, instead of otherwise commonly used linear approximations. In particular, the proposed solution elaborated on the prediction of the crossrange-range information, and formulated the corridor as a geometric curve, which offers much improved accuracy in envelop prediction. Simulation results verified the performance of the proposed scheme.