Autonomous Strategic Defense: An Adaptive Clustering Approach to Capture Order Optimization
Noah D. Zepp, Han Fu, Hugh H. T. Liu · AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum · 2022
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-2215.vid The proliferation of UAV technology has introduced a new risk to the security of high-value assets. Emerging advancement in cooperative multi-agent control of UAVs presents a means of automating a defensive response to these new threats. A practical realization of an automated defense strategy is limited by the computational constraints of onboard computers. The UAV’s onboard computer must solve multiple non-convex NP-hard navigation optimization problems to maximize the effectiveness of its defensive strategy. One such problem is the challenge of finding the optimal flight path for a single defender that must capture multiple slower invaders. This problem has been labeled as the n-Invader Capture Order Problem, abbreviated as n-ICOP. This research proposes an approximation method for reducing the solution space of n-ICOP. Given a specific constraint on computational resources, the method can adaptively reduce the computational load while optimizing the accuracy of the approximation. The new method splits the n-ICOP into a grouping problem and an ordered set problem, like the clustered variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem. The optimal grouping of invaders is estimated efficiently through the k-means clustering algorithm. The estimated grouping scheme reduces the complexity of an approximated n-ICOP solution because all strategies that separate members of a group are excluded from the search space. Simulations of the approximated n-ICOP solution were performed on a large data set of randomized defender-invader scenarios. Analysis suggests that this novel algorithm can reliably generate near-optimal strategies at a small fraction of the computational cost of a full exact solution. The results of the simulated trials demonstrate that the reduction in search space is substantial for the vast majority of randomized scenarios. This significant improvement in computational efficiency, with a sufficient degree of reliability, provides a practical means of solving for feasible n-ICOP solutions in a computationally limited environment.