Cooperative and Decentralized Decision-Making for Loyal Wingman UAVs

• Luiz Giacomossi ITA
• Stiven Schwanz Dias Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
• José Fernando Brancalion EMBRAER S. A.
• Marcos R. O. A. Maximo ITA

Resumo

With the application of decision-making techniques, it is possible to automate many of the intelligent decisions of UAVs, leaving human commanders to focus on higher-level decisions in modern warfare scenarios, providing a crucial tactical advantage. This paper applies key methods to enable decentralized decision-making for autonomous combat UAVs, also known as loyal wingman (LW) drones. A simulator was developed to simulate to implement and analyze the behaviors of the so-called LW. We used as the main decision-making technique the construction of a behavior tree (BT) capable of providing decisions in a decentralized manner, and for parameters optimization, the PSO optimization algorithm was used. Our approach shows a promising result of threat elimination efficiency of approximately 93%.

Palavras-chave: Conferences, Decision making, Education, Approximation algorithms, Robots, Optimization, Drones, Cooperative engagement capability, manned-unmanned teaming, loyal wingman, Decision-Making techniques