Multi-SUAVs Cooperative Trajectory Planning And Hardware In The Loop Simulation

In the war of future, the battlefield environment will be complicated, Only one small unmanned aerial vehicle will not have the enough combat ability, by using multiple swarm UAVs cooperation, UAVs can achieve high level autonomy, complete complex combat mission like coordinated regional coverage and coordinated attack. Multi-SUAVs cooperative trajectory planning is the foundation of cooperative mission control, it will maximize the entire combat effectiveness under all units of the system complete their own tasks. However, the research of cooperative trajectory planning is still at the beginning of development, the model structure is complex; the algorithm is low intelligent and low credibility of simulation method. In this paper, to solve the above problems, we used the improved ant colony optimization algorithm in the research of cooperative trajectory planning.Ant colony algorithm based on the principle of bionics design, which has been able to solve the problem of a single UAV trajectory planning by the theory of positive feedback control. This paper first analyzed the problem of single UAV trajectory planning, remolded the mathematical mode of the cooperative trajectory planning according to the special combat mission mode and the constraint conditions, and implemented the algorithm simulation based on the new cooperative mode. The paper also discussed the parameters selection and the route smoothing problems. Then, secondly, on the basis of conventional ant colony algorithm, the paper optimized and excited the implicit parallelism mechanism of ant colony algorithm, generated the multiple-species ant colony algorithm to solve the problem of multi-SUAVs cooperative trajectory planning problem. The paper also used the level classification method to simplify the cooperation problem, implemented the algorithm simulation based on the meantime assemble mission which is a representative task of offline cooperative trajectory planning problems.Because of the simulation environment of UAVs’ cooperation remained unreliable, the paper designed and set up a low cost and high reliability hardware in the loop simulation platform based on the commercial open-source flight control platform PIXHAWK and flight simulation software X-Plane, furthermore, used the platform validate the availability of waypoints which was planned by the multiple-species ant colony algorithm. The simulation results demonstrated that the waypoints planned by the algorithm can complete the coordination mission and the algorithm present by the paper also has high feasibility and credibility.