Online Route Planning for Cooperative Area Coverage Search of Aircraft Swarm

Abstract

Aiming at the problem of cooperative search for aircraft swarm in an unknown environment without prior information, a cooperative search algorithm with the coverage rate as the optimization objective is proposed, based on the Model Predictive Control theory and the Differential Evolution algorithm. Firstly, the Area Coverage Map (ACM) is established to describe the mission area, and a rapid method of updating the ACM based on Hadamard product is given. Then, the search effect is measured by coverage rate calculated based on the ACM. We regard the aircraft swarm as a control system, and establish a systematic prediction model. The maximum coverage rate in the predicted period is defined as the optimization goal, and the DE is used to solve this problem. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.