Multiple UAV coalition formation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to carry munitions in support of battlefield operations, however they have limited sensor range and can carry only small quantities of resources. Often, to fully prosecute a target, a variety of assets may be required, and it may be necessary to deliver these assets simultaneously. Therefore, a team of UAVs that satisfies the target resource requirement needs to be assigned to a single target, and this team is called a coalition. Other desired requirements for the coalition are (i) minimize the target prosecution delay and (ii) minimize the size of the coalition. In this paper, we propose a two-stage optimal coalition formation algorithm that assigns appropriate numbers of UAVs satisfying the desired requirements. We developed a Dubins curves based simultaneous strike scheme. Simulation results are presented to show that the two-stage coalition formation algorithm has low computational overhead and can be applied in real-time.