A User-Priority-Driven Multi-UAV Cooperative Reconnaissance Strategy

This paper considers a reconnaissance scenario where multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide services cooperatively for multiple users with different priorities. Although users all expect to acquire their needed information in a short time, the degree of urgency to meet their demands is different when taking their diverse priorities into account. A priority-driven multiuser satisfaction model is designed, where users’ satisfaction is quantified based on their different priorities, information acquisition demands, and the time they obtain their desired information. To ensure high priority users’ fast information acquisition while avoiding excessive delay in low priority users’ information acquisition, a batchwise information backhaul strategy is adopted. In each batch, a UAV is selected as the data ferry through a consultative mechanism to carry information back to users. This reconnaissance process is formulated as a cooperative path planning problem, where the optimization objective is maximizing users’ total satisfaction, while an intelligent algorithm is proposed to solve this problem effectively. The simulation results show that compared with traditional path planning algorithms without considering user satisfaction, our proposed algorithm can guarantee faster information acquisition for users with higher priorities, which leads to higher satisfaction. In addition, the applicability of our proposed reconnaissance strategy and path planning algorithm in different situations is also analyzed.