An optimal guidance law for a planar pursuit-evasion game of kind

AbstractA coplanar pursuit-evasion game of the kind in the atmosphere between a coasting pursuer and a maneuvering evader of constant speed is considered. For this game the adjoint equations can be integrated analytically starting at the circular target set of the game. This allows to express the optimal strategies of the pursuer and the evader on the boundary of the capture set, as functions of the current and final values of the variables. The evader strategy is a hard turn towards the final line of sight. For the pursuer, the closed form solution allows to synthesize a feedback guidance law for a real-time implementation. The performance achieved by this suboptimal pursuer strategy is substantially superior to proportional navigation and only slightly worse than the optimal