Mission planning and control of multiple UAVs

In this master thesis two different multi UAV problems are considered. The first one concerns planning and execution of a suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD) mission. We build upon earlier work by adding the important element of target assignment to the path planning, i.e. deciding what threats to fly around and what threats to engage. This is done by extending the state space to include the number of available High speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARMs). The possibility of considering different enemy radar ranges is also accommodated by adding extra edges to the initial Voronoi graph discretization. The planning output can further more be used as online decision support, since it contains estimated mission success probabilities for different position and armament combinations. Finally, the issue of timing the engagement of a single enemy surface to air missile (SAM) target is studied using a game theoretic dynamic programming approach. The second multi UAV problem considered is that of trajectory planning and target assignment on a much smaller scale, such as the final phase of a strike against multiple moving ground targets. To take advantage of the continuously arriving sensor data and respect the kinematic constraints, such as the vehicle minimum turning radius, we propose an algorithm that iteratively re-plans target assignments and trajectories. Finally, the algorithm accommodates prioritization of different target categories as well as a scheme for achieving scouting, concurrent strike and battle damage assessment (BDA).