Multi-UAV Collaborative Trajectory Optimization for Asynchronous 3-D Passive Multitarget Tracking

This article considers the 3-D collaborative trajectory optimization (CTO) of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles to improve multitarget tracking performance with an asynchronous angle of arrival measurements. The predicted conditional Cramer-Rao lower bound is adopted as a performance measure to predict and subsequently control tracking error online. Then, the CTO problem is cast as a time-varying nonconvex problem subjected to constraints arising from dynamic and security (height, collision, and obstacle/target/threat avoidance). Finally, a comprehensive solution method (CSM) is presented to tackle the resulting problem, according to its unique structures. Specifically, if all security constraints are inactive, the CTO can be simplified as a nonconvex problem with convex dynamic constraints, which can be solved by the nonmonotone spectral projected gradient (NSPG) method. Oppositely, an alternating direction penalty method (ADPM) is presented to solve the CTO problem with some positive security constraints. The ADPM introduces auxiliary vectors to decouple the complex constraints and separates the CTO into several subproblems and tackles them alternately, while locally adjusting the penalty factor at each iteration. We show the subproblem w.r.t. the position vector is nonconvex but with convex constraints, which can be efficiently solved by the NSPG method. The subproblems w.r.t. the auxiliary vectors are separable and have closed-form solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that the CSM outperforms the unoptimized method in terms of tracking performance. Besides, the CSM achieves the near-optimal performance provided by the genetic algorithm with much lower computational complexity.

Automated summary

This article discusses the 3-D collaborative trajectory optimization (CTO) problem of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles for improving multitarget tracking performance with asynchronous angle of arrival measurements. The predicted conditional Cramer-Rao lower bound is used as a measure of performance to predict and control tracking error online. The CTO problem is formulated as a time-varying nonconvex problem with constraints from dynamic and security considerations, and a comprehensive solution method (CSM) is proposed to address the problem by exploiting its unique structures.