Prediction of Projectile Impact Point using Approximate Statistical Moments
Cenk Demir, Mohammad Soltani, Abhyudai Singh · 2018
In this paper, trajectory and hit point prediction of a projectile is studied. Projectiles are subject to environmental noise such as wind effect and measurement noise. In addition, mathematical models of projectiles contain a large number of important states that should be taken into account for having a realistic prediction. Furthermore, dynamics of projectiles contain nonlinear functions such as monomials and sine functions. To address all these issues we formulate a stochastic model for the projectile. We showed that with a set of transformations projectile dynamics only contains nonlinearities of the form of monomials. In the next step, we derived approximate moment dynamics of this system using mean-field approximation. Our method still suffers from the size of the system. To address this problem we selected a subset of first- and second-order statistical moments and we showed that they give reliable approximations of the mean and standard deviation of the impact point for a real projectile.