Cooperative control of multi-UAV with time constraint in the threat environment

Cooperative control strategy can support coordinated attack for multi-UAV in threat environment, and achieve the greatest combat effectiveness with time constraint. It is a crucial problem with significant theoretical value and great practical value. Firstly, a cooperative path planning based expanded Voronoi diagram was proposed. The threat environments considered different types of threats and no-fly zones with different threat distances. Line-of-sight of path shortening algorithm and smoothing algorithm were proposed to realize dynamic optimization of the paths. Secondly, time error signal was obtained from real time-to-go and the estimated time-to-go by adopting a simple online time-to-go estimation method. Dynamic path planning on the basis of the estimated path was done to satisfy the impact time constraint. At last, simulation results proved validity and real-time. This method can support cooperative attack for multi-UAV.