Adaptive Navigation, Guidance and Control Techniques Applied to Ballistic Projectiles and Rockets

Accuracy and precision are the cornerstone for ballistic projectiles from the earliest days of this discipline. In the beginnings, impact point precision in artillery devices deteriorated when range were extended, particularly for non-propelled artillery rockets and shells. Later, inertial navigation and guidance systems are introduced and precision was unlinked from range increases. In the last 30 years, hybridization between inertial systems and GNSS devices has improved precision enormously. Unfortunately, during the last stages of flight, inertial and GNSS methods (hybridized or not) feature big errors on attitude and position determination. Low cost devices, which are precise on terminal guidance and do not feature accumulative error, such as quadrant photo-detector, seem to be appropriate to be included on the guidance systems. Hybrid algorithms, which combine GNSSs, IMUs and photodetectors, and a novel technic of attitude determination, which avoids the use of gyroscopes, are presented in this chapter. Hybridized measurements are implemented on modified proportional navigation law and a rotatory force control method. A realistic non-linear flight dynamics model has been developed to perform simulations to prove the accuracy of the presented algorithms.