Novel intelligent water drops optimization approach to single UCAV smooth trajectory planning

Trajectory planning of unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) is a rather complicated global optimum problem in UCAV mission planning. Intelligent water drops (IWD) algorithm is newly presented under the inspiration of the dynamic of river systems and the actions that water drops do in the rivers, and it is easy to combine with other methods in optimization. In this paper, we propose an improved IWD optimization algorithm for solving the single UCAV smooth trajectory planning problems in various combating environments. The water drops can act as an agent in searching the optimal UCAV trajectory. The detailed realization procedure for this novel approach is also presented. In order to make the optimized UCAV trajectory more feasible for exact flying, an efficient path smoothing method called the κ-trajectory is adopted for smoothing the single UCAV trajectory. Series experimental comparison results show the proposed IWD optimization algorithm is more effective and feasible in the single UCAV smooth trajectory planning than the basic IWD model.