Hawk-Pigeon Game Tactics for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Target Defense

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm target defense is a crucial and practical issue about group decision-making and cooperative control in multiagent systems. Hawk-pigeon game architecture is presented in this article to guide UAV swarm target defense. Firstly, a 6-degree-of-freedom UAV model is employed, and the control command converter is derived, which could be widely used in the transformation from the second-order integrator model to the 6-DOF UAV model. Moreover, the attack tactics and pursuit strategies of the defender UAVs are proposed inspired by the hawk's hunting mechanism, and the dynamic model of the attacker UAVs is formulated inspired by pigeon group homing behavior. Furthermore, the victory zone of the hawk-pigeon game is analyzed using the time of interception and explicitly exhibited in isochrones means. The proposed method is scalable and adaptive, adopting distributed decision-making to support large-scale UAV swarm engagement. Finally, comparative experiments in different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over state-of-the-art target-attacker-defender game methods on the win rate, the number of captures, and activity time.