Chapter 9

An Introduction to Proportional
Navigation

Module 8: Lecture 22
PPN; TPN; GTPN; IPN

Keywords. Proportional Navigation, PPN, TPN, GTPN, IPN

Proportional navigation is, by far, the most important of the classical guidance
laws. In this chapter we will give a brief description of the several variants of the PN
law that has appeared in the literature.

To explain how the PN law works let us first define an engagement geometry in
a 2-D plane. We shall use this engagement geometry or some variants of it in the sub-
sequent lectures. The engagement geometry is two dimensional and is given in Figure
9.1. Point mass models are assumed for both the missile and the non-maneuvering
target.

The missile lateral acceleration or latax is given by aM . The missile and target

140
 Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose 141

V
T
αT

T
V
M R

αM

θ
Ref
M

Figure 9.1: Missile-target engagement geometry

velocities are denoted by VM and VT , respectively. The equations of motion are,

Vr = Ṙ = VT cos(αT − θ) − VM cos(αM − θ) (9.1)

Vθ = Rθ̇ = VT sin(αT − θ) − VM sin(αM − θ) (9.2)

where, Vr is the rate of change of the LOS separation (i.e., the component of the relative
velocity of the target with respect to the missile along the LOS) and Vθ is the angular
velocity of the LOS (i.e., the component of this relative velocity perpendicular to the
LOS).

Now the Proportional Navigation (PN) guidance law is defined as a law that gen-
erates a guidance command (or a latax) which ensures that the rate of rotation of the
missile velocity vector is proportional to the rate of rotation of the LOS. That is,

α˙M = N θ̇ (9.3)

where, N is the navigation constant. This was the essence of the PN guidance law
when it was formulated in the early days of missile guidance research. This innocuous-
looking guidance law has, over the years, spawned an enormous variety of guidance
laws that have attempted to improve the performance of the basic PN law. These guid-
ance laws are popularly known as PN-variants.
142 Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose

In fact, the PN law is no longer referred to in the form of (9.3). It is expressed in

terms of the latax that is prescribed at different instants of time at various points on the
trajectory. We shall examine the structure of some of these laws in this lecture.

9.1 Pure Proportional Navigation (PPN)

One of the first complete definition of the PN law is what is now known as the Pure
Proportional Navigation (PPN) guidance law. This is also the most natural definition of
the PN law. We know that,
aM
α˙M = (9.4)
VM
So, from (9.3), we get,

aM = N VM θ̇ (9.5)

This is the PPN law. But there is one more point to be noted here. We know that (9.4)
is valid only when the lateral acceleration aM is perpendicular to the velocity VM of
the missile. So, according to the PPN law, the latax is given by (9.5) and is applied
perpendicular to the velocity vector of the missile. If we ignore the angle-of-attack of the
missile, then this direction of the latax is also the natural direction of the lift force which
is generated by the airframe and the lifting surfaces (as explained earlier) whenever
the missile maneuvers. Note that this lift force is responsible for generating the actual
lateral acceleration or latax. However, the only problem here is that the angle-of-attack
of a missile is never zero and for many highly maneuverable missiles it turns out to be
quite high. This is where PPN departs from reality and its elegant results stop being
fully applicable. In Figure 9.2(a), the PPN latax is shown.

9.2 True Proportional Navigation (TPN)

True proportional navigation is another variant of the proportional navigation guid-

ance law. The logic behind it is as follows: The velocity of interest is actually the clos-
ing velocity and not the missile velocity itself, because it is the closing velocity which
ultimately drives the LOS separation to zero. Moreover, it is also the LOS rate which
we are trying to drive to zero. So, why not apply the missile latax perpendicular to
the LOS and also make it proportional to the closing velocity? It isn’t a very convinc-
ing argument, but the guidance system designers who were desperate to explore ways
 Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose 143

V V
M a M
M
a
M LOS LOS
θ θ
Ref Ref
M M

(a) PPN (b) TPN

V
-V T
M
V
a M a
M M V T
V R
M
η LOS
LOS
θ θ
Ref V
M R M

(c) GTPN (d) IPN

Figure 9.2: (a) PPN Latax (b) TPN Latax (c) GTPN latax (d) IPN Latax

of improving the performance of PN law found this convincing enough to try it out.
Another reason was that VM is not directly available unless the missile carries an iner-
tial navigation unit, but Vc is easily available from the doppler data of the seeker. Of
course, there were some other arguments regarding the invariance of the latax history
N VM
with respect to the term Vc (= N  ) which clinched the argument in favour of true
proportional navigation, but we will not go into this at the moment. So the TPN law
was born with the following form,

aM = N  Vc θ̇ = −N  VR θ̇ (9.6)

where, N  is called the effective navigation ratio to distinguish it from the navigation
constant defined earlier, and Vc is the closing velocity. The word ratio is used to convey
the fact that N  can be interpreted as the navigation constant N multiplied by the ratio
VM /Vc . But the main difference between the PPN and the TPN was that here the latax
was applied perpendicular to the LOS and not to the missile velocity as in PPN (see Figure
9.2(b)). The main problem was that of implementation since this direction of the TPN
latax is not a natural direction of the lifting force generated by the missile airframe
which is ultimately responsible for the latax. But people came up with the idea of
using thrusters which could be fired either in the forward or aft direction to impart
144 Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose

an additional longitudinal acceleration or deceleration. This acceleration coupled with

the latax generated by the aerodynamic forces produced the desired latax in the desired
direction. But this was not a very practical solution since it was a burden to provide
for these extra thrusters. The next argument in favour of TPN was that if we want
to use missiles for exo-atmospheric interception then we will have to use thrusters to
generate a latax, because aerodynamic forces are non-existent at very high altitudes. So
it is only a very little extra effort to deflect the force due to these thrusters in the desired
direction. this was quite a convincing argument and quite a lot of work was done in
the area of TPN mainly because TPN was found to be more analytically tractable than
PPN.

Unfortunately, no matter what was done to make TPN perform better, its perfor-
mance remained below that of PPN. Actually, this particular fact was not initially re-
alized, because the initial analysis on TPN was done on a linearized geometry and
because of the linearization much of the actual performance results were not very reli-
able. Later, when Guelman (1971, 1972, 1976) carried out a nonlinear analysis of PPN
and TPN in a series of classic papers in the seventies, it was proved beyond any con-
ceivable doubt that the performance of TPN was far worse than that of PPN.

9.3 Generalized TPN (GTPN)

But the TPN enthusiasts did not give up easily. They generalized the TPN law by saying
that if we have the freedom of choosing our lateral acceleration direction, then why not
make that a part of the guidance law and define the latax direction as being deviated by
some angle from the normal to the LOS? This is shown in Figure 9.2(c). The idea was
to increase the capturability performance of the guidance law further and (hopefully!)
make it comparable to the PPN law. Well, it did improve matters a little bit, but not
much. As an idea, it was indeed an excellent one, but when it came to performance
evaluation, it did not measure up to the PPN performance. In fact some recent work
in this area has shown that a realistic implementation of TPN or GTPN, that takes into
account the fact that the closing velocity term is actually a time-varying one and not
constant as assumed by earlier researchers, deteriorated the performance even further.
Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose 145

9.4 Ideal Proportional Navigation (IPN)

A further significant development in this direction occurred when another variant of

the PN law called the Ideal Proportional Navigation was proposed. Here, the commanded
latax was applied perpendicular to the relative velocity between the missile and the target.
It is easy to see that the arguments in favour of this are similar to the arguments in
favour of TPN, given above. But, the performance was significantly different. It was
found that the capturability of this law was comparable to that of PPN and much better
than that of TPN or its many generalizations. Only problem was that this law was as
difficult to implement as TPN or any of its generalizations.

9.5 Concluding Remarks

There were quite a few other variations of the PN law which gave varying performance
under various conditions. Their importance arises more from an academic point of
view rather than from any real utility in the area of missile guidance. But both TPN and
PPN are important – TPN, because of the vast literature that it has generated and con-
sequently gave rise to many fundamental results in capturability which have a wider
application than just missile guidance, and PPN, because of its natural application to
guidance of missiles.

An important fact is that neither PPN nor TPN are the proper model for the actual
performance of the PN guidance law. PPN makes the assumption that the angle-of-
attack is zero, which is seldom the case. So the actual PN law is something that lies
between the PPN and TPN. In fact, an analytical solution of a variant of PPN law in
which the latax is applied at an angle (equal to the angle-of-attack) deviated from the
normal to the velocity vector of the missile then this will give the correct performance
analysis of the PN law. This is still an open and challenging problem of both academic
as well as practical interest.

The earliest reference to the many variants of the PN law, but in a linearized setting,
can be found in Murtaugh and Criel (1966). This paper also gives a fairly exhaustive
analysis, but in a linearized framework.

Guelman’s papers (1971, 1972) were perhaps the first significant results on PPN in
146 Guidance of Missiles/NPTEL/2012/D.Ghose

a nonlinear setting.

Guelman’s (1976) was again the first significant result on TPN in a nonlinear set-
ting. These results were later extended to a realistic framework with time-varying clos-
ing velocity. The generalization to TPN (GTPN) was first proposed by Yang et al. (1989).
Ideal PN (IPN) was proposed and analysed by Yuan and Chern (1992).

References

1. M. Guelman: A qualitative study of proportional navigation. IEEE Transactions on

Aerospace and Electronic Systems, AES-7, 4 (July 1971), 637-643.

2. M. Guelman: Proportional navigation with a maneuvering target. IEEE Transactions

on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, AES-8, 3 (May 1972), 364-371.

3. M. Guelman: The closed-form solution of true proportional navigation. IEEE Trans-

actions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, AES-12, 4 (July 1976), 472-482.

4. A.S. Murtaugh, and H.E. Criel: Fundamentals of proportional navigation. IEEE

Spectrum, 3, 12 (Dec. 1966), 75-85.

5. C.D. Yang, F.B. Hsiao, and F.B. Yeh: Generalised guidance law for homing missiles.
IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, AES-25, 2 (Mar. 1989), 197-
211.

6. P.J. Yuan and J.S. Chern: Ideal proportional navigation. Journal of Guidance, Control
and Dynamics, 15, 5 (November-December 1992), 1161-1165.