Abstract:

In the area coverage task, the cooperation of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles （UAVs） formation has high mobility and strong robustness, which can quickly collect information in the task area and respond in real time according to the environment changes. With the deepening application of electromagnetic spectrum warfare, UAV needs to avoid the radio frequency （RF） signals being detected and located when performing searching tasks. Therefore, on the basis of considering searching efficiency, a RF stealth oriented multi-UAV trajectory optimization method for cooperative area coverage is proposed. Firstly, the trajectory control parameters of multi-UAV cooperation are analyzed, and the probability of RF signal being intercepted is adopted as the criterion to evaluate the RF stealth performance. Based on the trajectory control constraints and the threshold of interception probability, the trajectory optimization model for the RF stealth is constructed. Then, the modified particle swarm optimization （PSO） algorithm is achieved by introducing the chaotic sequence for initializing solution set and the Levy flight mechanism for updating particle state, and combining with the dynamic inertia weight function, which realizes the solution of the trajectory optimization model for cooperative area coverage. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the RF stealth performance of UAVs formation compared with the searching performance-driven trajectory optimization method.

Key words: trajectory optimization, multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) collaboration, radio frequency stealth, area coverage, modified particle swarm optimization (PSO)