Optimizing multiple UAV cooperative ground attack missions

This paper presents an optimization based approach for cooperative multiple UAV attack missions. The objective is to determine the minimum resources required to coordinately attack a target at a given set of directions. We restrict the paths of the munitions to direct Dubins paths to satisfy field of view constraints and to avoid certain undesirable paths. The proposed algorithm derives the feasible positions and headings for each attack angle, and determines intersection regions corresponding to any two attack angles. We pose a set cover problem, the solution of which gives the minimum number of UAVs required to accomplish the mission.

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