Cooperative path planning for air–sea heterogeneous unmanned vehicles using search-and-tracking mission

The cooperative path planning problem for air–sea heterogeneous unmanned vehicles using search-and-tracking mission is studied in this paper. Due to the limitations of single unmanned vehicle, the air–sea heterogeneous system, composed of an unmanned aerial–aquatic vehicle (UAAV), an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), is introduced to compensate for the singleness of unmanned vehicle and complete more complicated marine missions. One search-and-tracking mission containing the search phase and tracking phase is presented to accomplish the underwater target tracking mission with goals of minimizing the search time and finding the shortest tracking path. In the search phase, according to different initial positions of three unmanned vehicles, the corresponding task allocation algorithms are proposed to determine the location of the target efficiently and minimize the search time by allocating different task for three unmanned vehicles. Meanwhile, the unmanned vehicles only know the approximate area containing the target before the task execution and move in the direction of the area for searching target. In the tracking phase, an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is addressed to solve the path planning problem with obstacles. Simulation results show that the underwater target can be detected using search-and-tracking mission in an air–sea heterogeneous system efficiently and accurately.