UAV path planning for passive multi-target following in complex environment

In this paper the problem of following multiple noncooperative and high agile surface targets using multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in complex environment is studied and a real-time rule-based target following algorithm is proposed. The complex environment consists of hard threats, soft threats and sensor missed detections. The multi-dimensional assignment algorithm is applied to address the data association problem, and the target trajectory approximation algorithm is then developed to determine the motion trajectories of the targets. And a simulation example is given to verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.