Air-to-ground reconnaissance-attack task allocation for heterogeneous UAV swarm

A task allocation problem for the heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm in unknown environments is studied in this paper. Considering that the actual mission environment information may be unknown, the UAV swarm needs to detect the environment first and then attack the detected targets. The heterogeneity of UAVs, multiple types of tasks, and the dynamic nature of task environment lead to uneven load and time sequence problems. This paper proposes an improved contract net protocol (CNP) based task allocation scheme, which effectively balances the load of UAVs and improves the task efficiency. Firstly, two types of task models are established, including regional reconnaissance tasks and target attack tasks. Secondly, for regional reconnaissance tasks, an improved CNP algorithm using the uncertain contract is developed. Through uncertain contracts, the area size of the regional reconnaissance task is determined adaptively after this task assignment, which can improve reconnaissance efficiency and resource utilization. Thirdly, for target attack tasks, an improved CNP algorithm using the fuzzy integrated evaluation and the double-layer negotiation is presented to enhance collaborative attack efficiency through adjusting the assignment sequence adaptively and multi-layer allocation. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the improved method are verified through comparison simulations.