Cooperative control of multiple UCAVs for SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense)

Abstract

In recent days, with the development of unmanned automatic control technologies, UAVs, represented by many advantages, such as greater maneuverability, escape from the high risk of human operation, weight saving, cost saving, etc, are used in various missions. Among the various missions for UAVs, as one of the future military tactics, SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) is a typical example of air-to-ground attack mission. It is considered to be able to demonstrate the usefulness of UCAVs in other air-to-ground attack missions that it is possible to accomplish the SEAD mission with an integrated control system of multiple UCAVs. This thesis deals with a hierarchical and fully automated control system which is suitable to typical SEAD mission. For the path finding and planning, most of the existing control scheme use the Voronoi-diagram concept, but a new path planning method which is based on the potential field concept is proposed in this thesis, and a new simple real-time trajectory modification method is proposed. The advantages and disadvantages of existing method (using Voronoi-diagram) and a new method (using potential field), are presented with virtual battle field simulation results.