Ground moving target engagement by cooperative UAVs

The purpose of this tutorial paper is to present an application example for the MultiUAV cooperative control simulation. MultiUAV has been used to simulate a cooperative moving target engagement (CMTE) scenario, with a team of UAVs acting as a sensor and communication network to cooperatively track and attack moving ground targets. This scenario illustrates the utility of MultiUAV for cooperative control applications requiring heterogeneous vehicles with varied sensor, communication, dynamic, and weapon capabilities. A human supervisor designates one or more moving ground targets for the vehicles to attack. The vehicle agents must then autonomously and cooperatively determine which vehicles perform the required tasks, when the tasks are performed, and what flight paths are used. This requires assigning time-dependent cooperative and joint tasks, where multiple sub-elements of the primary task must be accomplished by different vehicles, for any of the tasks to have value. This paper focuses on the unique requirements of the CMTE scenario and how they are addressed in the MultiUAV simulation.