Cooperative Control of Multiple UCAVs for Suppression of Enemy Air Defense

Abstract

In recent years, there is a growing interest in employing Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) for various military missions. One of typical examples is the suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) mission, in which the objective is to fly to the enemy territory to destroy, or suppress surface-based air defenses such as radars and surface-to-air missile sites. This paper deals with a hierarchical and fully automated control scheme which is suitable to typical SEAD mission using multiple UCAVs. For the path finding and planning, most of the existing control scheme use the Voronoi-diagram concept, but a new path planning method which is based on the potential field concept is proposed. The advantages and disadvantages of existing method and a new method are presented with virtual battle field simulation results.

Exploring network enabled concepts for U(C)AV payload driven navigation

“…In its simplest form, this can be comparable to the earlier mentioned loading of a stored flightplan, but more advanced approaches pursue the generation of a new plan based on real-time information about the environment [7,8].…”

“…The design determines how the system will initiate changes as a function of the specified tasks and the sensor data about the environment. 7 Adaptive aiding is similar to adaptive automation but also includes the (estimated) state of the human(s) in the system. The typical goal is to support human performance.…”

“…The solution is sought in an increase in autonomy of the plan generation/ modification function. Unlike projects that focus on fully autonomous UCAVs [7,8] (i.e. with the capability to autonomously adjust the plan based on a sensed state of the environment), the goal of the research described in this paper is to explore a more gradual increase in autonomy.…”

Multilevel Coalition Formation Strategy for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses Missions

“…On a lower-level, vehicles form ISR and combat teams, and on a higher-level, ISR teams coordinate with combat teams to eliminate threats. In fact, this particular set up of the SEAD mission, using a heterogenous network of vehicles, is what distinguishes our work from previous works done by other researchers related to the coordination of vehicles during suppression missions (for a representative sample, see [3][4][5][6][7]). Previous research efforts focused only on the combat aspects of the SEAD mission, and problems such as task allocation and path finding are addressed for a network of UCAVs.…”

Minimizing Mission Risk in Fuel-Constrained Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Path Planning

“…UAV path planning has been extensively studied in the literature [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. However, to the best of our knowledge, only Chaudhry et al [9] give the operator an explicit estimate of the risk associated with the proposed mission path.…”