Novel sliding-mode guidance law for supercavitating vehicles based on wake information

A novel sliding-mode guidance law was proposed making use of gradient information of ship wakes, to tackle the problems in current supercavitating vehicle such as poor maneuvering capability and limited detection methods.The wake gradient direction was dynamically determined according to the wakes of moving targets that were detected by the laser. The design of guidance law based on the sliding-mode theory guaranteed accurate tracking in the wake gradient direction till the final hits on the target ship. By using the wake information of targets, this scheme avoids the estimation of target motion states, which can benefit in reducing the energy consumption and improving the vehicle voyage significantly. Simulation results shows that the proposed method can guarantee the supercavitating vehicle-s rapid and accurate hits over targets, while at the same time, gaining strong robustness and interference immunity.