Metacognitive Decision-Making Framework for Multi-UAV Target Search Without Communication

This article presents a metacognitive decision-making (MDM) framework inspired by human-like metacognitive principles. The MDM framework is incorporated in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for decentralized stochastic search without communication for detecting and confirming stationary targets (fixed/sudden pop-up) and dynamic targets. The UAVs are equipped with multiple sensors (varying sensing capability) and search for targets in a largely unknown area. The MDM framework consists of a metacognitive component and a self-cognitive component. The metacognitive component helps to self-regulate the search with multiple sensors addressing the issues of “which-sensor-to-use,” “when-to-switch-sensor,” and “how-to-search.” Based on the information gathered by sensors carried by each UAV, the self-cognitive component regulates different levels of stochastic search and switching levels for effective searching, where the lower levels of search aim to localize a target (detection) and the highest level of a search exploit a target (confirmation). The performance of the MDM framework with two sensors having a low accuracy for detection and increased accuracy to confirm targets is evaluated through Monte Carlo simulations and compared with six decentralized multi-UAV search algorithms (three self-cognitive searches and three self and social-cognitive-based searches). The results indicate that the MDM framework can efficiently detect and confirm targets in an unknown environment.