Multi-aircraft cooperative path planning for maneuvering target detection

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>Multi-aircraft cooperative path planning is a key problem in modern and future air combat scenario. In this paper, this problem is studied in aspect of airborne radar detection to maintain a continuous tracking of a manoeuvring air target. Firstly, the objective function is established in combination with multiple constraints considered, including Doppler blind zone constraint, radar viewing aspect constraint, baseline constraint, and so on. Then, the above optimal control problem is transformed into a nonlinear programming problem with a series of algebraic constraints by hp-adaptive Gauss pseudospectral method (HPAGPM). And it is solved by GPOPS software package based on MATLAB. Simulation results show that the optimized cooperative paths can be got to achieve continuous tracking of maneuvering air target by HPAGPM.</p>