Development of UCAV Fleet Autonomy by Reinforcement Learning in a Wargame Simulation Environment

Abstract

In this study, we develop a machine learning based fleet autonomy for Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) utilizing a synthetic simulation-based wargame environment. Air-craft survivability is modeled as Markov processes. Mission success metrics are developed to introduce collision avoidance and survival probability of the fleet. Flight path planning is performed utilizing the proximal policy optimization (PPO) based reinforcement learning method to obtain attack patterns with a multi-objective mission success criteria corresponding to the mission success metrics. Performance of the proposed system is evaluated by utilizing the Monte Carlo analysis in which a wider initial position interval is used when compared to the defined interval in the training phase. This provides a preliminary insight about the generalization ability of the RL agent.