Bio-inspired UAV swarm operation approach towards decentralized aerial electronic defense

Abstract

The protection of critical assets and infrastructure from aerial attacks by adversaries is critical to national defense strategy. In this regard, autonomous aerial electronic defense with UAV swarm have the potential to distribute tasks and coordinate their operations to provide electronic countermeasures as an extra layer of defense. However, the challenge of decentralized coordination design of the swarm is a key bottleneck in UAV swarm electronic defense operations. This paper puts forward a decentralized honey bees-inspired multi-agent-based coordination design approach for UAV swarm in aerial electronic defense. The approach abstracts the coordination and planning of each UAV in the swarm as groups of agents with a hybrid hierarchical organization. Next, based on the behavior and operations of honey bees, a task planning model for coordination of the swarm is presented. Simulation results based on interception success rate, proportion of UAV working times, and interception path lengths show the proposed approach is capable of abstracting the swarm coordination problem and achieving a generally optimized aerial electronic defense. This approach shows promising results in designing a decentralized, responsive, and lightweight UAV swarm system capable of providing electronic countermeasures.