Comparative investigations of nonlinear and linear observers for a highly manoeuvrable target in sliding mode guidance

Target manoeuvre is one of the key factors affecting guidance accuracy. To intercept highly maneuverable targets, a second-order sliding-mode guidance law, which is based on the super-twisting algorithm, is designed without depending on any information about the target motion. In the designed guidance system, the target estimator plays an essential role. Besides the existing higher-order sliding-mode observer (HOSMO), a first-order linear observer (FOLO) is also proposed to estimate the target manoeuvre, and this is the major contribution of this paper. The closed-loop guidance system can be guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) in the presence of the FOLO. The comparative simulations are carried out to investigate the overall performance resulting from these two categories of observers. The results show that the guidance law with the proposed linear observer can achieve better comprehensive criteria for the amplitude of normalised acceleration and elevator deflection requirements. The reasons for the different levels of performance of these two observer-based methods are thoroughly investigated.