A Cooperative Approach to Multiple UAVs Searching for Moving Targets Based on a Hybrid of Virtual Force and Receding Horizon

This paper addresses the problem of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperative searching for several moving targets with a hybrid method, which is named VFRH. This method is a combination of the virtual force method and the receding horizon method. Its main idea is that the virtual force method is used to help the receding horizon method improve searching efficiencies and reduce the computational burdens. The cooperative tactics based on VFRH is subsequently proposed to make the search more effective for multiple UAVs. At last, performance of multi-UAV cooperatively searching for hidden targets based on VFRH shows the promising results.