Self-organized search-attack mission planning for UAV swarm based on wolf pack hunting behavior

Cooperative search-attack is an important application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm in military field. The coupling between path planning and task allocation, the heterogeneity of UAVs, and the dynamic nature of task environment greatly increase the complexity and difficulty of the UAV swarm cooperative search-attack mission planning problem. Inspired by the collaborative hunting behavior of wolf pack, a distributed self-organizing method for UAV swarm search-attack mission planning is proposed. First, to solve the multi-target search problem in unknown environments, a wolf scouting behavior-inspired cooperative search algorithm for UAV swarm is designed. Second, a distributed self-organizing task allocation algorithm for UAV swarm cooperative attacking of targets is proposed by analyzing the flexible labor division behavior of wolves. By abstracting the UAV as a simple artificial wolf agent, the flexible motion planning and group task coordinating for UAV swarm can be realized by self-organizing. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a set of simulation experiments, the stability and scalability are evaluated, and the integrated solution for the coupled path planning and task allocation problems for the UAV swarm cooperative search-attack task can be well performed.