Once the spoofer has controlled the navigation system of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), it is hard to effectively control the error convergence to meet the threshold condition only by adjusting parameters of estimation if estimation of the spoofer on UAV has continuous observation error. Aiming at this problem, the influence of the spoofer’s state estimation error on spoofing effect and error convergence conditions is theoretically analyzed, and an improved adaptively robust estimation algorithm suitable for steady-state linear quadratic estimator is proposed. It enables the spoofer’s estimator to reliably estimate UAV status in real time, improves the robustness of the estimator in responding to observation errors, and accelerates the convergence time of error control. Simulation experiments show that the mean value of normalized innovation squared (NIS) is reduced by 88.5%, and the convergence time of NIS value is reduced by 76.3%, the convergence time of true trajectory error of UAV is reduced by 42.3%, the convergence time of estimated trajectory error of UAV is reduced by 67.4%, the convergence time of estimated trajectory error of the spoofer is reduced by 33.7%, and the convergence time of broadcast trajectory error of the spoofer is reduced by 54.8% when the improved algorithm is used. The improved algorithm can make UAV deviate from preset trajectory to spoofing trajectory more effectively and more subtly.

In this paper, stochastic stabilization is investigated by max-plus algebra for a Markovian jump cloud control system with a reference signal. For the Markovian jump cloud control system, there exists framework adjustment whose evolution is satisfied with a Markov chain. Using max-plus algebra, a max-plus stochastic system is used to describe the Markovian jump cloud control system. A causal feedback matrix is obtained by exponential stability analysis for a causal feedback controller of the Markovian jump cloud control system. A sufficient condition is given to ensure existence on the causal feedback matrix of the causal feedback controller. Based on the causal feedback controller, stochastic stabilization in probability is analyzed for the Markovian jump cloud control system with a reference signal. Simulation results are given to show effectiveness of the causal feedback controller for the Markovian jump cloud control system.

According to the requirements of the live-virtual-constructive (LVC) tactical confrontation (TC) on the virtual entity (VE) decision model of graded combat capability, diversified actions, real-time decision-making, and generalization for the enemy, the confrontation process is modeled as a zero-sum stochastic game (ZSG). By introducing the theory of dynamic relative power potential field, the problem of reward sparsity in the model can be solved. By reward shaping, the problem of credit assignment between agents can be solved. Based on the idea of meta-learning, an extensible multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (EMADRL) framework and solving method is proposed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of model solving. Experiments show that the model meets the requirements well and the algorithm learning efficiency is high.

Spacecraft orbit evasion is an effective method to ensure space safety. In the spacecraft’s orbital plane, the space non-cooperate target with autonomous approaching to the spacecraft may have a dangerous rendezvous. To deal with this problem, an optimal maneuvering strategy based on the relative navigation observability degree is proposed with angles-only measurements. A maneuver evasion relative navigation model in the spacecraft’s orbital plane is constructed and the observabi-lity measurement criteria with process noise and measurement noise are defined based on the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound. Further, the optimal maneuver evasion strategy in spacecraft’s orbital plane based on the observability is proposed. The strategy provides a new idea for spacecraft to evade safety threats autonomously. Compared with the spacecraft evasion problem based on the absolute navigation, more accurate evasion results can be obtained. The simulation indicates that this optimal strategy can weaken the system’s observability and reduce the state estimation accuracy of the non-cooperative target, making it impossible for the non-cooperative target to accurately approach the spacecraft.

Channel estimation has been considered as a key issue in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems, which becomes more challenging with a large number of antennas. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based fast channel estimation method for mmWave massive MIMO systems. The proposed method can directly and effectively estimate channel state information (CSI) from received data without performing pilot signals estimate in advance, which simplifies the estimation process. Specifically, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based channel estimation network for the case of dimensional mismatch of input and output data, subsequently denoted as channel (H) neural network (HNN). It can quickly estimate the channel information by learning the inherent characteristics of the received data and the relationship between the received data and the channel, while the dimension of the received data is much smaller than the channel matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed HNN can gain better channel estimation accuracy compared with existing schemes.

The source location based on the hybrid time difference of arrival (TDOA)/frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) is a basic problem in wireless sensor networks, and the layout of sensors in the hybrid TDOA/FDOA positioning will greatly affect the accuracy of positioning. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as base stations, by optimizing the trajectory of the UAV swarm, an optimal positioning configuration is formed to improve the accuracy of the target position and velocity estimation. In this paper, a hybrid TDOA/FDOA positioning model is first established, and the positioning accuracy of the hybrid TDOA/FDOA under different positioning configurations and different measurement errors is simulated by the geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) factor. Second, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) matrix of hybrid TDOA/FDOA location under different moving states of the target is derived theoretically, the objective function of the track optimization is obtained, and the track of the UAV swarm is optimized in real time. The simulation results show that the track optimization effectively improves the accuracy of the target position and velocity estimation.

In airborne array synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the three-dimensional (3D) imaging performance and cross-track resolution depends on the length of the equivalent array. In this paper, Barker sequence criterion is used for sparse flight sampling of airborne array SAR, in order to obtain high cross-track resolution in as few times of flights as possible. Under each flight, the imaging algorithm of back projection (BP) and the data extraction method based on modified uniformly redundant arrays (MURAs) are utilized to obtain complex 3D image pairs. To solve the side-lobe noise in images, the interferometry between each image pair is implemented, and compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction is adopted in the frequency domain. Furthermore, to restore the geometrical relationship between each flight, the phase information corresponding to negative MURA is compensated on each single-pass image reconstructed by CS. Finally, by coherent accumulation of each complex image, the high resolution in cross-track direction is obtained. Simulations and experiments in X-band verify the availability.

To strengthen border patrol measures, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gradually used in many countries to detect illegal entries on borders. However, how to efficiently deploy limited UAVs to patrol on borders of large areas remains challenging. In this paper, we first model the problem of deploying UAVs for border patrol as a Stackelberg game. Two players are considered in this game: The border patrol agency is the leader, who optimizes the patrol path of UAVs to detect the illegal immigrant. The illegal immigrant is the follower, who selects a certain area of the border to pass through at a certain time after observing the leader’s strategy. Second, a compact linear programming problem is proposed to tackle the exponential growth of the number of leader’s strategies. Third, a method is proposed to reduce the size of the strategy space of the follower. Then, we provide some theoretic results to present the effect of parameters of the model on leader’s utilities. Experimental results demonstrate the positive effect of limited starting and ending areas of UAV’s patrolling conditions and multiple patrolling altitudes on the leader ’s utility, and show that the proposed solution outperforms two conventional patrol strategies and has strong robustness.

The utilization of traffic information received from intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS) to plan velocity and split output power for multi-source vehicles is currently a research hotspot. However, it is an open issue to plan vehicle velocity and distribute output power between different supply units simultaneously due to the strongly coupling characteristic of the velocity planning and the power distribution. To address this issue, a flexible predictive power-split control strategy based on IVHS is proposed for electric vehicles (EVs) equipped with battery-supercapacitor system (BSS). Unlike hierarchical strategies to plan vehicle velocity and distribute output power separately, a monolayer model predictive control (MPC) method is employed to optimize them online at the same time. Firstly, a flexible velocity planning strategy is designed based on the signal phase and time (SPAT) information received from IVHS and then the Pontryagin’s minimum principle (PMP) is adopted to formulate the optimal control problem of the BSS. Then, the flexible velocity planning strategy and the optimal control problem of BSS are embedded into an MPC framework, which is online solved using the shooting method in a fashion of receding horizon. Simulation results verify that the proposed strategy achieves a superior performance compared with the hierarchical strategy in terms of transportation efficiency, battery capacity loss, energy consumption and computation time.

Current successes in artificial intelligence domain have revitalized interest in neural networks and demonstrated their potential in solving spacecraft trajectory optimization problems. This paper presents a data-free deep neural network (DNN) based trajectory optimization method for intercepting non-cooperative maneuvering spacecraft, in a continuous low-thrust scenario. Firstly, the problem is formulated as a standard constrained optimization problem through differential game theory and minimax principle. Secondly, a new DNN is designed to integrate interception dynamic model into the network and involve it in the process of gradient descent, which makes the network endowed with the knowledge of physical constraints and reduces the learning burden of the network. Thus, a DNN based method is proposed, which completely eliminates the demand of training datasets and improves the generalization capacity. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed method.

Coherent change detection (CCD) is an effective method to detect subtle scene changes that occur between temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations. Most coherence estimators are obtained from a Hermitian product based on local statistics. Increasing the number of samples in the local window can improve the estimation bias, but cause the loss of the estimated images spatial resolution. The limitations of these estimators lead to unclear contour of the disturbed region, and even the omission of fine change targets. In this paper, a CCD approach is proposed to detect fine scene changes from multi-temporal and multi-angle SAR image pairs. Multi-angle CCD estimator can improve the contrast between the change target and the background clutter by jointly accumulating single-angle alternative estimator results without further loss of image resolution. The sensitivity of detection performance to image quantity and angle interval is analyzed. Theoretical analysis and experimental results verify the performance of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, a trajectory shaping guidance law, which considers constraints of ?eld-of-view (FOV) angle, impact angle, and terminal lateral acceleration, is proposed for a constant speed missile against a stationary target. First, to decouple constraints of the FOV angle and the terminal lateral acceleration, the third-order polynomial with respect to the line-of-sight (LOS) angle is introduced. Based on an analysis of the relationship between the looking angle and the guidance coefficient, the boundary of the coefficient that satisfies the FOV constraint is obtained. The terminal guidance law coefficient is used to guarantee the convergence of the terminal conditions. Furthermore, the proposed law can be implemented under bearings-only information, as the guidance command does not involve the relative range and the LOS angle rate. Finally, numerical simulations are performed based on a kinematic vehicle model to verify the effectiveness of the guidance law. Overall, the work offers an easily implementable guidance law with closed-form guidance gains, which is suitable for engineering applications.

The existing software bug localization models treat the source file as natural language, which leads to the loss of syntactical and structure information of the source file. A bug localization model based on syntactical and semantic information of source code is proposed. Firstly, abstract syntax tree (AST) is divided based on node category to obtain statement sequence. The statement tree is encoded into vectors to capture lexical and syntactical knowledge at the statement level. Secondly, the source code is transformed into vector representation by the sequence naturalness of the statement. Therefore, the problem of gradient vanishing and explosion caused by a large AST size is obviated when using AST to the represent source code. Finally, the correlation between bug reports and source files are comprehensively analyzed from three aspects of syntax, semantics and text to locate the buggy code. Experiments show that compared with other standard models, the proposed model improves the performance of bug localization, and it has good advantages in mean reciprocal rank (MRR), mean average precision (MAP) and Top N Rank.

The distributed hybrid processing optimization problem of non-cooperative targets is an important research direction for future networked air-defense and anti-missile firepower systems. In this paper, the air-defense anti-missile targets defense problem is abstracted as a nonconvex constrained combinatorial optimization problem with the optimization objective of maximizing the degree of contribution of the processing scheme to non-cooperative targets, and the constraints mainly consider geographical conditions and anti-missile equipment resources. The grid discretization concept is used to partition the defense area into network nodes, and the overall defense strategy scheme is described as a nonlinear programming problem to solve the minimum defense cost within the maximum defense capability of the defense system network. In the solution of the minimum defense cost problem, the processing scheme, equipment coverage capability, constraints and node cost requirements are characterized, then a nonlinear mathematical model of the non-cooperative target distributed hybrid processing optimization problem is established, and a local optimal solution based on the sequential quadratic programming algorithm is constructed, and the optimal firepower processing scheme is given by using the sequential quadratic programming method containing non-convex quadratic equations and inequality constraints. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation examples.

Considering packet losses, time-varying delay, and parameter uncertainty in the switched fuzzy system, this paper designs a robust fault detection filter at any switching rate and analyzes the H_∞ performance of the system. Firstly, the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model is used to establish a global fuzzy model for the uncertain nonlinear time-delay switched system, and the packet loss process is modeled as a mathematical model satisfying Bernoulli distribution. Secondly, through the average dwell time method and multiple Lyapunov functions, the exponentially stable condition of the nonlinear network switched system is given. Finally, specific parameters of the robust fault detection filter can be obtained by solving linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The effectiveness of the method is verified by simulation results.

To improve applicability and adaptability of the impact time control guidance (ITCG) in practical engineering, a two-stage ITCG law with simple but effective structure is proposed based on the hybrid proportional navigation, namely, the pure-proportional-navigation and the retro-proportional-navigation. For the case with the impact time error less than zero, the first stage of the guided trajectory is driven by the retro-proportional-navigation and the second one is driven by the pure-proportional-navigation. When the impact time error is greater than zero, both of the stages are generated by the pure-proportional-navigation but using different navigation gains. It is demonstrated by two- and three-dimensional numerical simulations that the proposed guidance law at least has comparable results to existing proportional-navigation-based ITCG laws and is shown to be advantageous in certain circumstances in that the proposed guidance law alleviates its dependence on the time-to-go estimation, consumes less control energy, and adapts itself to more boundary conditions and constraints. The results of this research are expected to be supplementary to the current research literature.

Constrained by complex imaging mechanism and extraordinary visual appearance, change detection with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images has been a difficult research topic, especially in urban areas. Although existing studies have extended from bi-temporal data pair to multi-temporal datasets to derive more plentiful information, there are still two problems to be solved in practical applications. First, change indicators constructed from incoherent feature only cannot characterize the change objects accurately. Second, the results of pixel-level methods are usually presented in the form of the noisy binary map, making the spatial change not intuitive and the temporal change of a single pixel meaningless. In this study, we propose an unsupervised man-made objects change detection framework using both coherent and incoherent features derived from multi-temporal SAR images. The coefficients of variation in time-series incoherent features and the man-made object index (MOI) defined with coherent features are first combined to identify the initial change pixels. Afterwards, an improved spatiotemporal clustering algorithm is developed based on density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and dynamic time warping (DTW), which can transform the initial results into noiseless object-level patches, and take the cluster center as a representative of the man-made object to determine the change pattern of each patch. An experiment with a stack of 10 TerraSAR-X images in Stripmap mode demonstrated that this method is effective in urban scenes and has the potential applicability to wide area change detection.

The rapid increase of the scale and the complexity of the controlled plants bring new challenges such as computing power and storage for conventional control systems. Cloud computing is concerned as a powerful solution to handle complex large-scale control missions by using sufficient computing resources. However, the computing ability enables more complex devices and more data to be involved and most of the data have not been fully utilized. Meanwhile, it is even impossible to obtain an accurate model of each device in the complex control systems for the model-based control algorithms. Therefore, motivated by the above reasons, we propose a data-driven predictive cloud control system. To achieve the proposed system, a practical data-driven predictive cloud control testbed is established and together a cloud-edge communication scheme is developed. Finally, the simulations and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

A two-dimensional directional modulation (DM) technology with dual-mode orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam is proposed for physical-layer security of the relay unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking transmission. The elevation and azimuth of the vortex beam are modulated into the constellation, which can form the digital waveform with the encoding modulation. Since the signal is direction-dependent, the modulated waveform is purposely distorted in other directions to offer a security technology. Two concentric uniform circular arrays (UCAs) with different radii are excited to generate dual vortex beams with orthogonality for the composite signal, which can increase the demodulation difficulty. Due to the phase propagation characteristics of vortex beam, the constellation at the desired azimuth angle will change continuously within a wavelength. A desired single antenna receiver can use the propagation phase compensation and an opposite helical phase factor for the signal demodulation in the desired direction. Simulations show that the proposed OAM-DM scheme offers a security approach with direction sensitivity transmission.

Equipment development planning (EDP) is usually a long-term process often performed in an environment with high uncertainty. The traditional multi-stage dynamic programming cannot cope with this kind of uncertainty with unpredictable situations. To deal with this problem, a multi-stage EDP model based on a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is proposed to respond quickly to any environmental changes within a reasonable range. Firstly, the basic problem of multi-stage EDP is described, and a mathematical planning model is constructed. Then, for two kinds of uncertainties (future capability requirements and the amount of investment in each stage), a corresponding DRL framework is designed to define the environment, state, action, and reward function for multi-stage EDP. After that, the dueling deep Q-network (Dueling DQN) algorithm is used to solve the multi-stage EDP to generate an approximately optimal multi-stage equipment development scheme. Finally, a case of ten kinds of equipment in 100 possible environments, which are randomly generated, is used to test the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed models. The results show that the algorithm can respond instantaneously in any state of the multi-stage EDP environment and unlike traditional algorithms, the algorithm does not need to re-optimize the problem for any change in the environment. In addition, the algorithm can flexibly adjust at subsequent planning stages in the event of a change to the equipment capability requirements to adapt to the new requirements.

In the applications of joint control and robot movement, the joint torque estimation has been treated as an effective technique and widely used. Researches are made to analyze the kinematic and compliance model of the robot joint with harmonic drive to acquire high precision torque output. Through analyzing the structures of the harmonic drive and experiment apparatus, a scheme of the proposed joint torque estimation method based on both the dynamic characteristics and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is designed and built. Based on research and scheme, torque estimation methods in view of only harmonic drive compliance model and compliance model with the Kalman filter are simulated as guidance and reference to promote the research on the torque estimation technique. Finally, a promoted torque estimation method depending on both harmonic drive compliance model and UKF is designed, and simulation results compared with the measurements of a commercial torque sensor, have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, the reinforcement learning method for cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS) with incremental number of agents is studied. The existing multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches deal with the MAS with a specific number of agents, and can learn well-performed policies. However, if there is an increasing number of agents, the previously learned in may not perform well in the current scenario. The new agents need to learn from scratch to find optimal policies with others, which may slow down the learning speed of the whole team. To solve that problem, in this paper, we propose a new algorithm to take full advantage of the historical knowledge which was learned before, and transfer it from the previous agents to the new agents. Since the previous agents have been trained well in the source environment, they are treated as teacher agents in the target environment. Correspondingly, the new agents are called student agents. To enable the student agents to learn from the teacher agents, we first modify the input nodes of the networks for teacher agents to adapt to the current environment. Then, the teacher agents take the observations of the student agents as input, and output the advised actions and values as supervising information. Finally, the student agents combine the reward from the environment and the supervising information from the teacher agents, and learn the optimal policies with modified loss functions. By taking full advantage of the knowledge of teacher agents, the search space for the student agents will be reduced significantly, which can accelerate the learning speed of the holistic system. The proposed algorithm is verified in some multi-agent simulation environments, and its efficiency has been demonstrated by the experiment results.

An effective maintenance policy optimization model can reduce maintenance cost and system operation risk. For mission-oriented systems, the degradation process changes dynamically and is monotonous and irreversible. Meanwhile, the risk of early failure is high. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic condition-based maintenance (CBM) optimization model for mission-oriented system based on inverse Gaussian (IG) degradation process. Firstly, the IG process with random drift coefficient is used to describe the degradation process and the relevant probability distributions are obtained. Secondly, the dynamic preventive maintenance threshold (DPMT) function is used to control the early failure risk of the mission-oriented system, and the influence of imperfect preventive maintenance (PM) on the degradation amount and degradation rate is analysed comprehensively. Thirdly, according to the mission availability requirement, the probability formulas of different types of renewal policies are obtained, and the CBM optimization model is constructed. Finally, a numerical example is presented to verify the proposed model. The comparison with the fixed PM threshold model and the sensitivity analysis show the effectiveness and application value of the optimization model.

Component reallocation (CR) is receiving increasing attention in many engineering systems with functionally interchangeable and unbalanced degradation components. This paper studies a CR and system replacement maintenance policy of series repairable systems, which undergoes minimal repairs for each emergency failure of components, and considers constant downtime and cost of minimal repair, CR and system replacement. Two binary mixed integer nonlinear programming models are respectively established to determine the assignment of CR, and the uptime right before CR and system replacement with the objective of minimizing the system average maintenance cost and maximizing the system availability. Further, we derive the optimal uptime right before system replacement with maximization of the system availability, and then give the relationship between the system availability and the component failure rate. Finally, numerical examples show that the CR and system replacement maintenance policy can effectively reduce the system average maintenance cost and improve the system availability, and further give the sensitivity analysis and insights of the CR and system replacement maintenance policy.

How to make use of limited onboard resources for complex and heavy space tasks has attracted much attention. With the continuous improvement on satellite payload capacity and the increasing complexity of observation requirements, the importance of satellite autonomous task scheduling research has gradually increased. This article first gives the problem description and mathematical model for the satellite autonomous task scheduling and then follows the steps of “satellite autonomous task scheduling, centralized autonomous collaborative task scheduling architecture, distributed autonomous collaborative task scheduling architecture, solution algorithm". Finally, facing the complex and changeable environment situation, this article proposes the future direction of satellite autonomous task scheduling.

In this paper, we introduce an incident angle based fusion method for radar and infrared sensors to improve the recognition rate of complex targets under half space scenarios, e.g., vehicles on the ground in this paper. For radar sensors, convolutional operation is introduced into the autoencoder, a “winner-take-all (WTA)” convolutional autoencoder (CAE) is used to improve the recognition rate of the radar high resolution range pro?le (HRRP). Moreover, different from the free space, the HRRP in half space is more complex. In order to get closer to the real situation, the half space HRRP is simulated as the dataset. The recognition rate has a growth more than 7% compared with the traditional CAE or denoised sparse autoencoder (DSAE). For infrared sensor, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used for infrared image recognition. Finally, we combine the two results with the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory, and the discounting operation is introduced in the fusion to improve the recognition rate. The recognition rate after fusion has a growth more than 7% compared with a single sensor. After the discounting operation, the accuracy rate has been improved by 1.5%, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, a velocity filtering based track-before-detect algorithm in mixed coordinates is presented to address the problem of integration loss caused by inaccurate motion model in polar coordinate sensors. Since the motion of a constant velocity (CV) target is better modeled in Cartesian coordinates, the search of measurements for integration in polar sensor coordinates is carried out according to the CV model in Cartesian coordinates instead of an approximate model in polar sensor coordinates. The position of each cell is converted into Cartesian coordinates and predicted according to an assumed velocity. Then, the predicted Cartesian position is converted back to polar sensor coordinates for multiframe accumulation. The use of the correct model improves integration effectiveness and consequently improves algorithm performance. To handle the weak target with unknown velocity, a velocity filter bank in mixed coordinates is presented. The influence of velocity mismatch on the performance of filter bank is analyzed, and an efficient strategy for filter bank design is proposed. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we focus on the failure analysis of unmanned autonomous swarm (UAS) considering cascading effects. A framework of failure analysis for UAS is proposed. Guided by the framework, the failure analysis of UAS with crash fault agents is performed. Resilience is used to analyze the processes of cascading failure and self-repair of UAS. Through simu-lation studies, we reveal the pivotal relationship between resilience, the swarm size, and the percentage of failed agents. The simulation results show that the swarm size does not affect the cascading failure process but has much influence on the process of self-repair and the final performance of the swarm. The results also reveal a tipping point exists in the swarm. Meanwhile, we get a counter-intuitive result that larger-scale UAS loses more resilience in the case of a small percentage of failed individuals, suggesting that the increasing swarm size does not necessarily lead to high resilience. It is also found that the temporal degree failure strategy performs much more harmfully to the resilience of swarm systems than the random failure. Our work can provide new insights into the mechanisms of swarm collapse, help build more robust UAS, and develop more efficient failure or protection strategies.

Anti-ship missile coordinated attack mission planning is a complex multi-objective optimization problem with multiple combinations of platforms, strong decision-making constraints, and tightly coupled links. To avoid the coupling disorder between path planning and firepower distribution and improve the efficiency of coordinated attack mission planning, a firepower distribution model under the conditions of path planning is established from the perspective of decoupling optimization and the algorithm is implemented. First, we establish reference coordinate system of firepower distribution to clarify the reference direction of firepower distribution and divide the area of firepower distribution; then, we construct an index table of membership of firepower distribution to obtain alternative firepower distribution plans; finally, the fitness function of firepower distribution is established based on damage income, missile loss, ratio of efficiency and cost of firepower distribution, and the mean square deviation of the number of missiles used, and the alternatives are sorted to obtain the optimal firepower distribution plan. According to two simulation experiments, the method in this paper can effectively solve the many-to-many firepower distribution problem of coupled path planning. Under the premise of ensuring that no path crossing occurs, the optimal global solution can be obtained, and the operability and timeliness are good.

To meet the requirements of safety, concealment, and timeliness of trajectory planning during the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) penetration process, a three-dimensional path planning algorithm is proposed based on improved holonic particle swarm optimization (IHPSO). Firstly, the requirements of terrain threat, radar detection, and penetration time in the process of UAV penetration are quantified. Regarding radar threats, a radar echo analysis method based on radar cross section (RCS) and the spatial situation is proposed to quantify the concealment of UAV penetration. Then the structure-particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is improved from three aspects. First, the conversion ability of the search strategy is enhanced by using the system clustering method and the information entropy grouping strategy instead of random grouping and constructing the state switching conditions based on the fitness function. Second, the unclear setting of iteration numbers is addressed by using particle spacing to create the termination condition of the algorithm. Finally, the trajectory is optimized to meet the intended requirements by building a predictive control model and using the IHPSO for simulation verification. Numerical examples show the superiority of the proposed method over the existing PSO methods.

This paper develops a deep estimator framework of deep convolution networks (DCNs) for super-resolution direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In addition to the scenario of correlated signals, the quantization errors of the DCN are the major challenge. In our deep estimator framework, one DCN is used for spectrum estimation with quantization errors, and the remaining two DCNs are used to estimate quantization errors. We propose training our estimator using the spatial sampled covariance matrix directly as our deep estimator’s input without any feature extraction operation. Then, we reconstruct the original spatial spectrum from the spectrum estimate and quantization errors estimate. Also, the feasibility of the proposed deep estimator is analyzed in detail in this paper. Once the deep estimator is appropriately trained, it can recover the correlated signals’ spatial spectrum fast and accurately. Simulation results show that our estimator performs well in both resolution and estimation error compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

The threat sequencing of multiple unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) is a multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. In the threat sequencing process of multiple UCAVs, due to the strong confrontation and high dynamics of the air combat environment, the weight coefficients of the threat indicators are usually time-varying. Moreover, the air combat data is difficult to be obtained accurately. In this study, a threat sequencing method of multiple UCAVs is proposed based on game theory by considering the incomplete information. Firstly, a zero-sum game model of decision maker ( $\mathcal{D}$ ) and nature ( $\mathcal{N}$ ) with fuzzy payoffs is established to obtain the uncertain parameters which are the weight coefficient parameters of the threat indicators and the interval parameters of the threat matrix. Then, the established zero-sum game with fuzzy payoffs is transformed into a zero-sum game with crisp payoffs (matrix game) to solve. Moreover, a decision rule is addressed for the threat sequencing problem of multiple UCAVs based on the obtained uncertain parameters. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Electric power is widely used as the main energy source of ship integrated power system (SIPS), which contains power network and electric power network. SIPS network reconfiguration is a non-linear large-scale problem. The reconfiguration solution influences the safety and stable operation of the power system. According to the operational characteristics of SIPS, a simplified model of power network and a mathematical model for network reconfiguration are established. Based on these models, a multi-agent and ant colony optimization (MAACO) is proposed to solve the problem of network reconfiguration. The simulations are carried out to demonstrate that the optimization method can reconstruct the integrated power system network accurately and efficiently.

Micro-Doppler feature extraction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is important for their identification and classification. Noise and the motion state of the UAV are the main factors that may affect feature extraction and estimation precision of the micro-motion parameters. The spectrum of UAV echoes is reconstructed to strengthen the micro-motion feature and reduce the influence of the noise on the condition of low signal to noise ratio (SNR). Then considering the rotor rate variance of UAV in the complex motion state, the cepstrum method is improved to extract the rotation rate of the UAV, and the blade length can be intensively estimated. The experiment results for the simulation data and measured data show that the reconstruction of the spectrum for the UAV echoes is helpful and the relative mean square root error of the rotating speed and blade length estimated by the proposed method can be improved. However, the computation complexity is higher and the heavier computation burden is required.

This paper focuses on the solution to the dynamic affine formation control problem for multiple networked under-actuated quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to achieve a configuration that preserves collinearity and ratios of distances for a target configuration. In particular, it is investigated that the quad-rotor UAVs are steered to track a reference linear velocity while maintaining a desired three-dimensional target formation. Firstly, by integrating the properties of the affine transformation and the stress matrix, the design of the target formation is convenient and applicable for various three-dimensional geometric patterns. Secondly, a distributed control method is proposed under a hierarchical framework. By introducing an intermediary control input for each quad-rotor UAV in the position loop, the necessary thrust input and the desired attitude are extracted. In the attitude loop, the desired attitude represented by the unit quaternion is tracked by the designed torque input. Both conditions of linear velocity unavailability and mutual collision avoidance are also tackled. In terms of Lyapunov theory, it is prooved that the overall closed-loop error system is asymptotically stable. Finally, two illustrative examples are simulated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.

Reconnaissance mission planning of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) under an adversarial environment is a discrete combinatorial optimization problem which is proved to be a non-deterministic polynomial (NP)-complete problem. The purpose of this study is to research intelligent multi-UAVs reconnaissance mission planning and online re-planning algorithm under various constraints in mission areas. For numerous targets scattered in the wide area, a reconnaissance mission planning and re-planning system is established, which includes five modules, including intelligence analysis, sub-mission area division, mission sequence planning, path smoothing, and online re-planning. The intelligence analysis module depicts the attribute of targets and the heterogeneous characteristic of UAVs and computes the number of sub-mission areas on consideration of voyage distance constraints. In the sub-mission area division module, an improved K-means clustering algorithm is designed to divide the reconnaissance mission area into several sub-mission areas, and each sub-mission is detected by the UAV loaded with various detective sensors. To control reconnaissance cost, the sampling and iteration algorithms are proposed in the mission sequence planning module, which are utilized to solve the optimal or approximately optimal reconnaissance sequence. In the path smoothing module, the Dubins curve is applied to smooth the flight path, which assure the availability of the planned path. Furthermore, an online re-planning algorithm is designed for the uncertain factor that the UAV is damaged. Finally, reconnaissance planning and re-planning experiment results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper are effective and the algorithms designed for sequence planning have a great advantage in solving efficiency and optimality.

In the field of satellite imagery, remote sensing image captioning (RSIC) is a hot topic with the challenge of overfitting and difficulty of image and text alignment. To address these issues, this paper proposes a vision-language aligning paradigm for RSIC to jointly represent vision and language. First, a new RSIC dataset DIOR-Captions is built for augmenting object detection in optical remote (DIOR) sensing images dataset with manually annotated Chinese and English contents. Second, a Vision-Language aligning model with Cross-modal Attention (VLCA) is presented to generate accurate and abundant bilingual descriptions for remote sensing images. Third, a cross-modal learning network is introduced to address the problem of visual-lingual alignment. Notably, VLCA is also applied to end-to-end Chinese captions generation by using the pre-training language model of Chinese. The experiments are carried out with various baselines to validate VLCA on the proposed dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more descriptive and informative than existing algorithms in producing captions.

Driven by the improvement of the smart grid, the active distribution network (ADN) has attracted much attention due to its characteristic of active management. By making full use of electricity price signals for optimal scheduling, the total cost of the ADN can be reduced. However, the optimal day-ahead scheduling problem is challenging since the future electricity price is unknown. Moreover, in ADN, some schedulable variables are continuous while some schedulable variables are discrete, which increases the difficulty of determining the optimal scheduling scheme. In this paper, the day-ahead scheduling problem of the ADN is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP) with continuous-discrete hybrid action space. Then, an algorithm based on multi-agent hybrid reinforcement learning (HRL) is proposed to obtain the optimal scheduling scheme. The proposed algorithm adopts the structure of centralized training and decentralized execution, and different methods are applied to determine the selection policy of continuous scheduling variables and discrete scheduling variables. The simulation experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Multi-carrier faster-than-Nyquist (MFTN) can improve the spectrum efficiency (SE). In this paper, we first analyze the benefit of time frequency packing MFTN (TFP-MFTN). Then, we propose an efficient digital implementation for TFP-MFTN based on filter bank multicarrier modulation. The time frequency packing ratio pair in our proposed implementation scheme is optimized with the SE criterion. Next, the joint optimization for the coded modulation MFTN based on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart is performed. The Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to verify performance gain of the joint inner and outer code optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the TFP-MFTN has a 0.8 dB and 0.9 dB gain comparing to time packing MFTN (TP-MFTN) and higher order Nyquist at same SE, respectively; the TFP-MFTN with optimized low density parity check (LDPC) code has a 2.9 dB gain comparing to that with digital video broadcasting (DVB) LDPC. Compared with previous work on TFP-MFTN (SE=1.55 bit/s/Hz), the SE of our work is improved by 29% and our work has a 4.1 dB gain at BER=1×10^?5.

Rich semantic information in natural language increases team efficiency in human collaboration, reduces dependence on high precision data information, and improves adaptability to dynamic environment. We propose a semantic centered cloud control framework for cooperative multi-unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system. Firstly, semantic modeling of task and environment is implemented by ontology to build a unified conceptual architecture, and secondly, a scene semantic information extraction method combining deep learning and semantic web rule language (SWRL) rules is used to realize the scene understanding and task-level cloud task cooperation. Finally, simulation results show that the framework is a feasible way to enable autonomous unmanned systems to conduct cooperative tasks.