Unmanned Combat Aircraft Route Planning

With the progress of aviation science&technology, Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV for short) will play a more and more important role in future war. As an important way to enhance the campaign effectiveness of UCAVs, the path planning has got the interesting of the campaign planner. This paper puts emphasis on study of path planning algorithms .The main contributions are summarized as follows:(1) The threat environment, mainly as the radar threat, is studied and the detection probability of the aircraft is analyzed. Then the path efficiency index is given. The route planning is realized by the use of ant colony algorithm when the path efficiency index is given.(2) The low altitude penetration path planning is studied. This paper proposes a concept of safe surface based on digital map preprocessing techniques including digital map information fusion and integrated terrain elevation smoothing. Thus, three-dimensional flight path optimization planning can be changed into two-dimensional flight path planning on the surface of minimum risk. At last, the ant colony algorithm is used to realize the route planning.(3) The cooperative path planning and the threat-avoidance of multi-UCAV is studied. The system model of cooperative path planning for multi-UCAV is given .The mission planning model is solved by the Genetic Algorithm using the expense-to-benefit efficiency index. The Voronoi map and Dijkstra Algorithm are used to realize the path planning for each UCAV. Through adjusting coordination variable ETA (estimated team arrival time) , coordination agent selects paths and feasible velocities among each UCAV initial optimal and suboptimal paths, such that timing constraint is satisfied. At last, we can get the cooperative path for each UCAV.(4) The threats, which are not predicted in digital map but detected by airborne sensors, can be avoided in the real time flight path planning algorithm. This paper uses the continued dynamic A~· search method to solve this problem.Simulation results demonstrating the feasibility of the approach are presented.