Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Coalition Formation and Control for Collaborative Defense Mission

This article investigates the collaborative defense problem of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a 3-D space with an important area. A two-phase defense strategy is proposed for multiple defending UAVs (defenders) to cooperatively prevent the adversarial UAVs (intruders) from approaching the important area. In the first phase, considering that a single defender may lack the ability to neutralize an intruder independently, a game-theoretical-based coalition formation algorithm is proposed to drive defenders to form different-sized defending coalitions to neutralize multiple intruders with different abilities. In the second phase, once a defending coalition is established, a distributed enclosing control protocol is presented to guide the coalition members to collaboratively form an enclosing configuration around the detected intruder, the purpose of which is to restrict the movement of the intruder. Both the coalition formation algorithm and the enclosing control protocol are designed based on the local interactions with the neighboring defenders, which are scalable and executable. Simulation tests demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Meanwhile, the scalability and flexibility of the proposed strategy are also discussed in detail.