On Line Threat Computation For Unmanned Air Vehicles.

Document Type : Research Studies

Authors

1 M.SC Electrical Engineering., Port-Said Shipyard., Suez Canal., Authority.

2 Professor of Electrical Engineering Department., Faculty of Engineering., Suez Canal University.

3 Power and Machines Engineering Department., Faculty of Engineering., Helwan., Helwan University

Abstract

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have potential strengths to be implemented in the battle fields. A major problem for UAVs is to plan an optimal trajectory path from its starting position to the target position in real time. For a path to be optimal it has to minimize: threat, path length, fuel consumption, flying time, and preserves dynamic constructs of the vehicle.
The safety of the vehicle (i. e. minimizing the threats) has the first priority in the planning process. A major problem in this field is : how to compute the threats for a path on-line? A reliable solution for this problem is not settled yet. Different proposals are published, each has its own limitations. Some of these techniques integrate a threat cost function. The price is a long computation time that cancels the vehicle autonomy, since it cannot be done in real time.
Other widely used techniques sacrifice the accuracy of the threat computation for the sake of smaller computation time. The threat is computed by this simplified method only at three points on each path leg (edge). These 3 points are the optimal dispersion in Sukharev grid. Examining this method shows that it is ir-reliable since the threat value is decreasing with the increase of path length at the same closure to the radar site. In all those methods the concern is only about radar sites threats.
In this paper a short survey for threat cost computation methods is introduced. A proposed method that introduces an answer for the mentioned questions. This method computes the real threat not only from radars but also from surface to Air Missiles SAMs by integration using Chebychev quadratic formula in a very short time. The procedure is compared with results obtained by Simpson’s Formula and with those get by the simplified technique (for computation time and accuracy). This simplified technique is commonly used in a lot of researches. The comparison proves that this methodology is accurate and very fast. It fulfills the two crucial goals : accuracy and swiftness. Moreover, the increment in computation time due to the increase in the arguments (UAVs, targets, radar sites) is trivial.

Main Subjects