Guidance and control of unmanned ground, sea, and aerial vehicles that guide themselves autonomously to their target is increasingly complicated and requires extensive processing power. Tactical air-to-air missiles in pursuit of highly maneuverable targets have challenging guidance and control issues including:
- Ranging to the target
- Estimation of target motion
- Generation of guidance commands to optimally steer the missile toward target intercept
- Control of the coupled, nonlinear, multivariable, and uncertain dynamics of the air-to-air missile
Altera® FPGAs provide an ideal computational fabric for guidance and control applications. Altera’s Arria® and Cyclone® SoCs integrate an ARM®-based hard processor system (HPS) consisting of processor, peripherals, and memory interfaces with the FPGA fabric using a high-bandwidth interconnect backbone.
Figure 1. Communications Module (SDR)
Missiles
Missiles are considered to be smart munitions. They are guided internally or externally to impact in a precise area. There are two primary ways to accomplish this, either through global positioning system (GPS) guidance, or through laser guidance. The traditional approach to missile guidance employs proportional navigation and augmented guidance algorithms. Each portion of this challenge—estimation, guidance, and control—requires intense computational power provided by an FPGA such as one from the Stratix® family.
Unmanned Aerial and Terrain Systems
Unmanned aerial and terrain vehicles and increased use of robotics are used to both replace people with machines and team people with autonomous platforms. Challenges include uncertain terrain, noisy sensor data, and countermeasures by opposing forces.
