LAUSR

True proportional navigation (TPN) guidance law is widely used for exoatmospheric interception, for its robustness and ease of implementation. The performance of TPN against nonmaneuvering target or the maneuvering target with a specific acceleration had been analyzed before. However, the obtained results are not suitable for the realistic exoatmospheric interception scenario, since the target may maneuver along an arbitrary direction with an arbitrary but upper-bounded acceleration in the three-dimensional (3D) space, which is the so-called “true-arbitrarily maneuvering target” in this paper. With the help of the line-of-sight (LOS) rotation coordinate system, the performance of 3D TPN against the true-arbitrarily maneuvering target is thoroughly analyzed using the Lyapunov-like approach. The upper-bound of the 3D LOS rate is obtained, and so is that of the commanded acceleration of 3D TPN. After that, the capture region of 3D TPN is presented on the initial relative velocity plane. The nonlinear 3D relative kinematics between the interceptor and the target is taken into full account. Finally, the new theoretical findings are demonstrated by numerical simulations.