Coordinated Threat Assignments and Mission Management of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Eloy García, David W. Casbeer · 2017
Autonomous decentralized decision making and path planning for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in contested environments represents a challenging problem in cooperative control. This type of problem involves a coordinated choice of actions such as which targets to attack and by which UAV while minimizing the use of resources that include fuel, weapon inventory, and transmission of information. The wide area search munitions (WASM) problem is a special type of task assignment problem in the sense that several tasks need to be performed on the same target and in strict sequential order. This chapter proposes a distributed approach for selection of threats to eliminate when more than one target is present. It considers the existence of more than one main target. An approach is proposed such that each UAV determines both the main target to visit and the subset of threats it will eliminate in its way to reach the selected main target.