Multi-UAV Cooperative Hunting Using PSO in 3D Cluttered Environment

Abstract

Cooperative hunting has been an active research field in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) studies. In a three-dimensional (3D) world, the underneath UAV could be influenced by the downwash impact created from the UAV above when a trajectory crossing exists. This paper introduced a solution to realize the cooperative hunting of multi-UAV in a cluttered environment with obstacles. The comparison with a flocking navigated solution with an adaptive height downwash model considered in an obstacle-free environment and the distributed sliding mode position controller solution in a cluttered environment where the target is moving are presented and discussed at the end of the paper. The proposed solution is observed to succeed in cooperative hunting of a moving/static target in a cluttered/obstacle-free environment with faster convergences and shorter trajectories than the other two solutions.