Manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative combat system: Concepts, technologies, and challenges

The future battlefield is confronted with the problems such as high complexity of the environment, strong antagonism of the game, high real-time response, information incompleteness, and boundary uncertainty. To win the future aerospace battlefield, the manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative combat system can become the core key due to its advantages of dual effectiveness, complementarities of combat weaknesses, and high efficiency of action coordination. This paper focuses on the research status of Manned/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MAV/UAV) cooperative combat, which is a new direction of high difficulty, rapid development, broad prospects in applications and multidisciplinary combat. The research status of manned/unmanned cooperative combat is summarized from three aspects: system concepts, key technologies and challenges. The definitions of system combat, winning mechanism and application process and the key technologies such as detection and situational awareness, mission planning, command and decision making, formation control, and effectiveness evaluation are expounded. Finally, the challenges of MAV/UAV cooperative combat in the future battlefield are prospected, and new ideas for the development of intelligent combat technology in the future are provided.