Simulation study of some tracking and control methods for aircraft intercept operations

Abstract

The use of radar tracking in aircraft intercept operations introduces a random noise factor into the control system. Some techniques have been proposed for organizing and smoothing the radar data prior to insertion in the control system, however, the efficiency of these techniques in providing an optimum interpretation of radar data is suspect in the case of maneuvering targets. A simulator design using a general purpose digital computer is proposed to enable observation of the behavior of certain track smoothing mentods in a typical intercept problem. The method of aircraft vectoring control in the simulator design is discussed. The effects of angular and linear target acceleration on some tracking methods is described and illustrated. Application of sampled data theory to digital computer programming is shown in a simple filter design. Simulator was programmed by author and the USNPGS CDC 1604 computer was used to conduct testing.