Investigation and Comparison of Proportional Navigation Guidance and Beam Rider Guidance

Air defense has an increasing importance in today's wars. To gain the advantage in air combat, pursuit interceptor aircraft, which use Air-to-Air Missiles (AAMs), have become more and more significant. However, these are not sufficient alone. The importance of Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) also can not be ignored in air defense. SAMs can use different tactical navigation guidance methods. Of these, two of the more important guidance methods are Proportional Navigation Guidance and Beam Rider Guidance, which are investigated in this thesis. To understand the idea better, a brief description and discussion of missiles are provided. Parts of the guided missiles are defined to see how each part plays a specific role in hitting a target. Equations for both Proportional Navigation Guidance and Beam Rider Guidance are derived with the help of a two-dimensional missile-target engagement geometry. Different engagement scenarios are created and each scenario is simulated by using the MATLAB tool. Such MATLAB-based simulation results provide a direct head-to-head comparison between the two methods and provide an opportunity to gauge which guidance method is better for different kinds of engagement scenarios. Pros and cons are evaluated and a comparison between Proportional Navigation Guidance and Beam Rider Guidance is presented at the end of the simulations.