ANOTHER POINT-OF-VIEW ON PROPORTIONAL NAVIGATION

Proportional navigation is one of the most popular and one of the most used of the guidance laws. But the way it is studied is always the sa me: the acceleration needed to reach a known target is derived or anal yzed. This way of studying guidance laws is called ''the direct proble m'' by the authors. On the contrary, the problem considered here is to find, from the knowledge of a part of the trajectory of a maneuvering object, the target of this object. The authors call this way of study ing guidance laws ''the inverse problem''.