On‐line estimation and path planning for multiple vehicles in an uncertain environment

A unified approach to cooperative target tracking and path planning for multiple vehicles is presented. All vehicles, friendly and adversarial, are assumed to be aircraft. Unlike the typical target tracking problem that uses the linear state and nonlinear output dynamics, a set of aircraft nonlinear dynamics is used in this work. Target state information is estimated in order to integrate into a path planning framework. The objective is to fly from a start point to a goal in a highly dynamic, uncertain environment with multiple friendly and adversarial vehicles, without collision. The estimation architecture proposed is consistent with most path planning methods. Here, the path planning approach is based on evolutionary computation technique which is then combined with a nonlinear extended set membership filter in order to demonstrate a unified approach. A cooperative estimation approach among friendly vehicles is shown to improve speed and routing of the path. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.