Abstract

Various methods have been developed to predict the flight path of an air-launched weapon to intercept a fast-moving target in the air. However, it is also getting more challenging to predict the optimal firing zone and provide it to a pilot in real-time during engagements for advanced weapons having new complicated guidance and thrust control. In this study, a method is proposed to develop an optimized weapon engagement zone by the SCG (Scaled Conjugate Gradient) algorithm to achieve both accurate and fast estimates and provide an optimized launch display to a pilot during combat engagement. SCG algorithm is fully automated, includes no critical user-dependent parameters, and avoids an exhaustive search used repeatedly to determine the appropriate stage and size of machine learning. Compared with real data, this study showed that the development of a machine learning-based weapon aiming algorithm can provide proper output for optimum weapon launch zones that can be used for operational fighters. This study also established a process to develop one of the critical aircraft-weapon integration software, which can be commonly used for aircraft integration of air-launched weapons.