Aerial Swarm Defense Using Interception and Herding Strategies

This article presents a multimode solution to the problem of defending a circular protected area (target) from a wide range of attacks by swarms of
risk-taking
and/or
risk-averse
attacking agents (attackers). The proposed multimode solution combines two defense strategies, namely: 1) an interception strategy for a team of defenders to intercept multiple
risk-taking
attackers while ensuring that the defenders do not collide with each other; 2) a herding strategy to herd a swarm of
risk-averse
attackers to a safe area. In particular, we develop mixed integer programs (MIPs) and geometry-inspired heuristics to distribute and assign and/or reassign the defenders to interception and herding tasks under different spatiotemporal behaviors by the attackers such as splitting into smaller swarms to evade defenders easily or high-speed maneuvers by some risk-taking attackers to maximize damage to the protected area. We provide theoretical as well as numerical comparison of the computational costs of these MIPs and the heuristics, and demonstrate the overall approach in simulations.