A Virtual Motion Camouflage Approach for Cooperative Trajectory Planning of Multiple UCAVs

This paper investigates cooperative trajectory planning of multiple unmanned combat aerial vehicles (multi-UCAV) in performing autonomous cooperative air-to-ground target attack missions. By integrating an approximate allowable attack region model, several constraint models, and a multicriterion objective function, the problem is formulated as a cooperative trajectory optimal control problem (CTOCP). Then, a virtual motion camouflage (VMC) for cooperative trajectory planning of multi-UCAV, combining with the differential flatness theory, Gauss pseudospectral method (GPM), and nonlinear programming, is designed to solve the CTOCP. In particular, the notion of the virtual time is introduced to the VMC problem formulation to handle the temporal cooperative constraints. The simulation experiments validate that the CTOCP can be effectively solved by the cooperative trajectory planning algorithm based on VMC which integrates the spatial and temporal constraints on the trajectory level, and the comparative experiments illustrate that VMC based algorithm is more efficient than GPM based direct collocation method in tackling the CTOCP.