Hybrid hierarchical trajectory planning for a fixed-wing UCAV performing air-to-surface multi-target attack

This paper considers the problem of generating a flight trajectory for a single fixed-wing unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) performing an air-to-surface multi-target attack (A/SMTA) mission using satellite-guided bombs. First, this problem is formulated as a variant of the traveling salesman problem (TSP), called the dynamic-constrained TSP with neighborhoods (DCTSPN). Then, a hierarchical hybrid approach, which partitions the planning algorithm into a roadmap planning layer and an optimal control layer, is proposed to solve the DCTSPN. In the roadmap planning layer, a novel algorithm based on an updatable probabilistic roadmap (PRM) is presented, which operates by randomly sampling a finite set of vehicle states from continuous state space in order to reduce the complicated trajectory planning problem to planning on a finite directed graph. In the optimal control layer, a collision-free state-to-state trajectory planner based on the Gauss pseudospectral method is developed, which can generate both dynamically feasible and optimal flight trajectories. The entire process of solving a DCTSPN consists of two phases. First, in the offline preprocessing phase, the algorithm constructs a PRM, and then converts the original problem into a standard asymmetric TSP (ATSP). Second, in the online querying phase, the costs of directed edges in PRM are updated first, and a fast heuristic searching algorithm is then used to solve the ATSP. Numerical experiments indicate that the algorithm proposed in this paper can generate both feasible and near-optimal solutions quickly for online purposes.