Abstract:  To solve the problem of collaborative path planning of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) under radar threatening environment, an intelligent method based on Voronoi diagram and ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed. According to known radar threat sources, a weighted Voronoi diagram
is created to discretize the flying space into a grid. ACO is then used to obtain a set of selectable paths for each UAV. The parameters are properly chosen to relax the optimality of ACO so that multi-solutions can be found. A coordination function is created, and the estimated team arrival time (ETA) is taken as the time constraint to pick out the final path of each UAV. The path is smoothed for actual flight. Simulation results show that the proposed method can satisfy the requirements of time coordination and overall optimal.

Key words: multiple UAV coordination, path planning, Voronoi diagram, ant colony optimization, optimization control