Feasibility considerations in formation control: Phantom track generation through multi-UAV collaboration

Considered is the so called radar deception problem to motivate a change in paradigm in the approach to formation control that would address the key issue of dynamic feasibility. In this problem a team of possibly heterogeneous fixed winged unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperate to deceive a ground radar network into seeing a spurious phantom track in its radar space. A real-time motion planning algorithm is developed for this collaborating multi-agent system. At the heart of the proposed algorithm is the explicit consideration of actuator and operating constraints of the individual agents. Constrained dynamics of the multi-agent system are derived such that these constraints are transparent in the dynamic equations, to address the key issue of dynamic feasibility in formation control. Simulations are given validating the proposed approach.