Multiple cooperative unmanned air vehicles engaging multiple targets time-optimally

This article presents a solution to the real-time control of cooperative unmanned air vehicles that engage multiple targets in a time-optimal manner. Techniques to allocate vehicles dynamically to targets and to find the time-optimal control actions of vehicles are proposed. The effectiveness of the time-optimal control technique is first demonstrated through numerical examples. The proposed control strategy is then applied to two practical problems: firstly ten vehicles engage four targets where each target must be engaged by three vehicles, and secondly, four vehicles engage ten targets where each target must be engaged by two vehicles. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, and the applicability to the real-time control and the scalability of the proposed control strategy are further discussed.