HAWK-INSPIRED COOPERATIVE ENCIRCLEMENT GUIDANCE OF FIXED-WING UAV SWARM WITH LIMITED COMMUNICATION IN THREAT SCENARIO

This paper tackles the challenging problem of safety-critical cooperative guidance of the fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm system with limited interaction for dynamic target encirclement. In the task scenario, several non-cooperative flight vehicles threaten the UAV flight safety and intend to prevent the encirclement. A hawk-inspired multi-layer framework is proposed in this work to guide the UAV swarm to safely encircle the target. Each layer copes with a decomposed guidance subproblem. Firstly, an online cooperative allocation for each UAV’s blockading area is implemented with the modeled Harris hawk swarm’s hunting criteria adopted. Secondly, the Hawks’ predation strategy is employed as the cooperative pursuit guidance law based on the UAV nonlinear dynamics model and multi-threat interception model. Besides, a control barrier function (CBF) for non-cooperative scenario based on the three-dimensional (3D) Velocity Obstacle (VO) is designed to achieve safety penetration. The proposed approach is scalable and adaptive due to adopting distributed decision-making and control modes to support large-scale UAV swarm engagement amidst limited communication. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-layer cooperative guidance framework of the limitedcommunicating UAV swarm for the target encirclement under multiple threats.