Self-organized search-attack mission planning for UAV swarm based on wolf pack hunting behavior

• Published in: Journal of systems engineering and electronics 2021-12, Vol.32 (6), p.1463-1476
• Main Authors: Jinqiang, Hu, Husheng, Wu, Renjun, Zhan, Rafik, Menassel, Xuanwu, Zhou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1004-4132; 1004-4132
• DOI: 10.23919/JSEE.2021.000124

Cooperative search-attack is an important applica-tion of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm in military field. The coupling between path planning and task allocation, the hetero-geneity of UAVs, and the dynamic nature of task environment greatly increase the complexity and difficulty of the UAV swarm cooperative search-attack mission planning problem. Inspired by the collaborative hunting behavior of wolf pack, a distributed self-organizing method for UAV swarm search-attack mission plan-ning is proposed. First, to solve the multi-target search problem in unknown environments, a wolf scouting behavior-inspired co-operative search algorithm for UAV swarm is designed. Second, a distributed self-organizing task allocation algorithm for UAV swarm cooperative attacking of targets is proposed by analyz-ing the flexible labor division behavior of wolves. By abstracting the UAV as a simple artificial wolf agent, the flexible motion plan-ning and group task coordinating for UAV swarm can be rea-lized by self-organizing. The effectiveness of the proposed me-thod is verified by a set of simulation experiments, the stability and scalability are evaluated, and the integrated solution for the coupled path planning and task allocation problems for the UAV swarm cooperative search-attack task can be well performed.