Task Allocation and Path Planning for Collaborative Swarm Guidance in Support of Artillery Mission

The last few decades have seen the emergence of autonomous actors for various uses on the battlefield. New methods to safely and efficiently guide these actors have therefore been developed. This paper considers a complete military scenario involving autonomous actors cooperating with artillery systems. Then, focusing on the path planning and task allocation aspects, a brief review and classification of available methods is given in order to select the most promising ones for our case study. Based on existing works, these chosen methods include the Voronoi diagram, the satisficing paradigm, the Simulated Annealing algorithm and the k-means method. Combinations of these methods in four different approaches are implemented and compared to assess which one shows the best ratio between computation time and flying time to complete a mission.