Unmanned aerial vehicle swarm distributed cooperation method based on situation awareness consensus and its information processing mechanism

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm autonomous cooperation method is the basis of UAV swarm intelligent decision-making and cooperative engagement. Due to the complexity and antagonism of the mission environment, usually UAV swarm works in a distributed architecture. However, the process of situation awareness (SA) and the uncertainty of situation information have not been considered carefully by existing distributed cooperation methods. This paper proposes UAV swarm distributed cooperation method based on SA consensus and its information processing mechanism. Firstly, combined with the characteristics of swarm cooperative engagement, we analyze the essence of swarm distributed cooperation methods and propose swarm distributed cooperation method based on SA consensus, which can be further classified into situation perception consensus and situation comprehension consensus. Then, based on different types of consensus model of group decision making (GDM), we regard the UAVs which have a certain autonomous intelligence as intelligent decision-makers and establish the corresponding information processing mechanisms of proposed distributed cooperation methods. Finally, theoretical analysis and case study are used to demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method, which is more suitable for complex and antagonistic mission environment. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.