A Novel Range Estimator for Surface to Air Missile with Closing Velocity Measurements

A practical range estimator based on the robust Kalman filter is proposed to solve the range estimation problem for surface to air missile(SAM) homing guidance. Apart from the previous works based on the extended Kalman filter(EKF) with bearing only measurement, the proposed scheme makes use of line-of-sight(LOS) rate to ensure the fast convergency at long-range. In this reason, the robust Kalman filter is considered to deal with LOS rate measurement error. The recursive linear structure of proposed filter is easy to implement and make it possible to reduce computational burdens. Moreover, it shows good estimation performance without specific guidance law such as oscillation proportional navigation guidance(OPNG).