Coordinating networked uninhabited air vehicles for persistent area denial

This paper explores the problem of cooperative control among multiple networked unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for persistent area denial (PAD) mission. An adaptive Markov chain model is used to predict the locations of pop-up threats. The mixed information of predicted pop-up threats and actual pop-up targets is utilized to develop cooperative strategies for networked UAVs. The approach is illustrated by use of a simulation test bed for multiple networked UAVs and Monte Carlo simulation runs to evaluate our cooperative strategy. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of using predicted pop-up information in improving the overall PAD mission performance.