Launcher Homing UAV
E.Vinod Shankar Vinoo Kaarthick .M
Bachelor of engineering (pursuing) Bachelor of engineering (pursuing)
Electrical and Electronics Department Mechanical Engineering Department
Mepco Schlenk Engg.College Mepco Schlenk Engg.College
Anna University, India Anna University, India
ABSTRACT
All of the expensive technology that goes into a fighter jets, attack helicopters and bombers wouldn't be much use on the battlefield without any ordnance. While they're not as expensive or complex as the military vehicles that carry them, guns, missiles and bombs are the end technology that finally gets the job done in combat. And most of today's missiles and bombs are pretty impressive aircrafts in their own right. Smart weapons don't just sail through the air; they actually find their own way to the target. Smart weapons have built-in seeking systems that let them home in on a target, which makes them highly efficient and devastating. One such smart weapon is the Stinger missile. The Stinger weapon system is a fire and forget, man portable (34.5 pounds), shoulder-fired, supersonic missile system designed to counter high-speed, low-level, ground attack aircraft. Once fired, Stinger uses Proportional Navigation Algorithms to guide the missile to a predicted intercept point. The guidance section consists of a seeker assembly, a guidance assembly, a control assembly, a missile battery, and four control surfaces (or wings) that provide in-flight maneuverability. Miniature elint seeker to locate sources of active radiation in an aircraft, software and hardware changes, including a new roll frequency sensor, a small battery, and an improved computer processor and memory, up gradation by adding a ring laser gyro to eliminate the need to super elevate, prior to firing have been made to make this weapon more deadlier. Many counter measures have come up and have stretched the extremities of electronic warfare. The stinger’s seeker is fitted with a filter to reduce the effectiveness of decoying flares and to block IR emissions. Thermal Imagers to accurately differentiate between the aircraft and IRCMs have cropped up. This has lead to the development of newer techniques in counter-measures.
We have designed a UAV (unmanned air vehicle) to perform the two most needy operations- defending the aircraft and offending the stinger launcher. This may sound a distant dream but technology makes it
possible. We have designed a UAV to first divert the stinger from its trace by re-altering its thermal image with the IR signature of the UAV. This is done by tampering the RMP’s (re-programmable microprocessor) image using specially designed signal processing algorithms. The temporarily changed path would guide the stinger to target the UAV giving time for the aircraft to change its course. This is the defensive role played by the UAV.The UAV velocity is matched with the stinger so that there is a relative distance separating them. This is achieved by the rear LASER emitter and receiver unit, which uses a Doppler effect to match the velocities. The master control unit already programmed by the user gives the default distance of separation. This will create a virtual lock between the stinger and the UAV. The nose of the UAV will have the rerouting unit, which after receiving the signal from the rear-locking unit would transmit a “LOCKED” signal to the aircraft control unit. This would initiate a reversal algorithm that works on the path history of the stinger (received by the radar in the parent aircraft) to trace back the path of the stinger to its launcher. This reversed data is transmitted to the re-routing unit of the UAV so that along with the stinger it traces back the path originally traversed by the stinger and destroys the enemy location within a range.
This “launcher homing UAVs” when implemented in the war field would provide a useful counter-measure against stinger attacks.