Research On Multi-UAV Mission Planning Based On Cooperative Mechanism

As well known, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology can provide many services and facilities for national economy and human social life in many fields, such as emergencies, earthquake relief and military mission and so on. However, due to the complexity and diversity of missions as well as the emerging application requirements of different application field, how to realize the multiple UAVs execute missions cooperatively to prosecute the heterogeneous type missions becomes an important problem in the research of UAVs which has attracted wide attention from industry and academic fields.Multi-UAV cooperative mission planning is a key technology of UAVs cooperative mission prosecuting. But the complexity mission scenario brings UAV mission planning technology many challenges:First of all, the rapidly changed topology of UAVs network impacts the reliability of communication seriously. And it makes the mission consultation and planning between UAVs without reliable communication support. Secondly, the heterogeneous types of missions will make the problem of multi-UAV mission allocation complex. If it takes into account the time constraints caused by multi-UAV cooperation, the solving of this problem will become more difficult. Finally, the burst of mission, randomness of UAVs distribution and diversity of navigation constraints will bring challenge to the effectiveness of multi-UAV path planning. And the final plan of path planning directly determines the effect of the UAVs prosecuting missions.This thesis researches on the key problems of multi-UAV mission planning and achieves the following results:1. According to the impact on network routing caused by rapidly changed UAV network topology, this paper proposes a kind of network routing method based on location information auxiliary. The main idea of this method is to make the next hop choice based on prediction of UAVs displacement in order to reduce the impact of routing temporarily blind. At the same time, with the help of two hop neighbors’auxiliary information, the proposed method reduces the impact of routing void. The experiment results show that proposed method efficiently ensures the reliability of UAV network routing by the mechanism metioned above.2. In the process of multi-UAV mission allocation, according to the contradiction between UAV resources and mission requirements, as well as timing conflicts between missions, this paper proposes a method based on time window for multi-UAV mission allocation. The main idea of this method is to model the heterogeneous mission allocation problem based on the mechanism of idle time window to satisfy the time sequence and resource constraints. Then a two stage mission allocation method based on greedy algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization is proposed to solve the problem modeled previously. The experiment results show that the proposed method takes into account the requirements of timeliness and effectiveness to solve mission allocation efficiently with high completion rate and low execution time.3. According to the space-time requirements caused by cooperative mission prosecuting, this paper proposes a method of multi-UAV path planning based on cooperative ant colony optimization algorithm. The method models the navigation cost based on multi-UAV cooperative space-time constraints at first. It reflects the affect of navigation safety and multi-UAV cooperative performance according to different plans. Then an improved cooperative ant colony optimization algorithm based on mechanisms of pheromone attraction/exclusion and cooperative voyage updating is proposed to satisfy the requirement of mult-UAV path planning. It constructs paths with minimum cost as well as satisfying the space-time constraints. The experiment results show that the proposed method can meet the space-time requirement of path planning and construct optimal paths for UAV formation.