A research framework on mission planning of the UAV swarm

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm, a new form of system of system (SoS), is the focus of various countries at present. Mission planning, however, is the key to successfully accomplish mission of UAV swarms. Although the mission planning technology has achieved a lot of results, there are not many achievements in the field of UAV swarms. In this paper, the mission planning of the UAV swarm is described in detail in the following aspects: basic concept, command and control (C2) modality of swarm, contents and key technologies of UAV swarms mission planning. This paper regards the biggest difference of mission planning between the UAV swarm and general UAV system is the distributed architecture of swarm. Based on Anticipation-Influence-Reaction (AIR) distributed architecture, a new command and control modality of the UAV swarm is put forward in the paper. Generally, this paper provides a way of overall understanding and thinking on UAV swarms mission planning.