Guidance Law for a Surveillance UAV Swarm Tracking a High Capability Malicious UAV

Abstract

Significant research is currently focused on the issue of malicious UAVs or drones disrupting critical services (e.g. civilian airport operations). One mitigation is to track or pursue a malicious UAV back to its point of origin (and possibly its owner) using a swarm of surveillance UAVs. This becomes of particular academic interest when the malicious UAV has superior capabilities to the individual surveillance UAVs (e.g. in terms of maximum speed). In this paper, we deduce a guidance law (i.e. a rule for determining the direction of flight) for individual surveillance UAVs to maximize the tracking time of a highly capable malicious UAV. We then demonstrate the validity of the analysis using some examples with realistic contemporary UAV capability parameters. The significance of this research is that, in a networked swarm of surveillance UAVs which communicate with each other, if each surveillance UAV maximizes its tracking time, there is a higher probability that the next closest surveillance UAV can be in a position to assume tracking responsibilities when the malicious UAV moves out of tracking range of the original surveillance UAV. In order to demonstrate this, a simulation of a networked swarm of surveillance UAVs which track a high capability malicious UAV is undertaken under various scenarios.