Research On The Route Planning Of Multiple UCAV Cooperation

Unmanned aerial vehicle will play a more and more important role in future warfare.In the increasingly complex combat environments,multiple UCAV cooperation will be the main method of future UCAV operations.Multiple UCAV cooperative route planning is an important part of multiple UCAV mission planning,it is also the key technology to guarantee the effective cooperative operation of multiple UCAV,and will be of great significance to enhance the cooperative operation efficiency of multiple UCAV.Multiple UCAV cooperative route planning is studied in this paper and the major work and achievements include:(1)To deal with the low efficiency of path planning in large scale map,the nodes explosion phenomena of traditional A * algorithm is discussed,the concept of symmetry path is introduced and a new rectangle expansion A* based on breaking path symmetries is presented.By adopting linear search nodes and rectangular expansion units,the number of nodes to be searched and visited is reduced greatly,and the efficiency of the algorithm is improved significantly.The optimality proof is given.The standard data set from Grid Based Path Planning Competition of university of Denver is adopted to test the algorithm and compare it with several advanced variants of A* algorithms.Experimental results show that,without any pre-processing,the new algorithm can speed up a highly optimized A* by an order of magnitude and more while preserving completeness and optimality,and the advantage of REA* will be greater while the map scale increase.So the new algorithm is very suitable for the UCAV cooperative route planning in large scale digital raster map.(2)To deal with the variety and complexity of multiple UCAV mission,the UCAV route planning problems under several typical operational requirements and the existing processing technologies are discussed.Aimed at improving the path quality,a new single-boundary rectangle expansion A*(REA*)algorithm is presented.The new forced expansion rule is adopted to shorten the path length further,reduce the redundancy of the adjacent path points,avoid unnecessary twists,and improve the quality of the result paths.To deal with the time limited path planning,the anytime rectangle expansion A* algorithm is presented.The planning process will be divided into two stages: the stage for fast feasible solution and the stage to converge to optimal solution,which will improve the ability to path planning in time limited environment.To deal with the turning constraint and start/goal angle constraint of UCAV,a new direction constraint based rectangle expansion A* is presented.The rectangle expansion strategy and the directional expansion mechanism are combined to improve the efficiency of direction constraint path planning.Experimental results show that the new algorithms can deal with path planning problem under these typical operational requirements better than existing technologies.(3)To deal with the multiple UCAV cooperative flight planning problem,the expected time risk,the safety time redundancy and the efficiency of UCAV flight plan in uncertain battlefield are defined,based on the influence of the uncertainty of battlefield environment on efficiency of multiple UCAV.An optimization model for multiple UCAV cooperative flight planning based on the uncertainty of battlefield is presented.The multiple phase decomposed planning process is given to maximize the efficiency of multiple UCAV cooperation.The route planning method for UCAV in three dimensional environment and the method to handle UCAV combat constraint are presented based on the longitudinal information dissemination mechanism among rectangular elements.The time/space cooperation mechanism for multiple UCAV is designed,based on combined the non-uniform adjustment method.The terminal maneuver control and the non-uniform speed control are combined,while both the scope and the precision of the adjustment method are improved,the dynamic operational efficiency of multiple UCAV is also enhanced.Methods to generate flight plan and adjust it dynamically are also designed based on safety redundancy.(4)The simulation system software for multiple UCAV cooperative flight planning is developed,and the simulation experiments for UCAV route planning,multiple UCAV time/space cooperation and the flight plan generation/dynamic adjustment of multiple UCAV are designed.Via simulation and demonstration,and the comparation analysis and discussion with the existing methods,the feasibility and efficiency of the UCAV route planning algorithm,multiple UCAV time/space cooperation mechanism and the method for flight plan generation/dynamic adjustment in this paper are proved.