Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm collaboration enhances mission effectiveness. However, fixed-wing UAV swarm flights face collaborative safety control problems within a limited airspace in complex environments. Aimed at the cooperative control problem of fixed-wing UAV swarm flights under the airspace constraints of a virtual tube in a complex environment, this paper proposes a behavior-based distributed control method for fixed-wing UAV swarm considering flight safety constraints. Considering the fixed-wing UAV swarm flight problem in complex environment, a virtual tube model based on generator curve is established. The tube keeping, centerline tracking and flight safety behavioral control strategies of the UAV swarm are designed to ensure that the UAV swarm flies along the inside of the virtual tube safety and does not go beyond its boundary. On this basis, a maneuvering decision-making method based on behavioral fusion is proposed to ensure the safe flight of UAV swarm in the restricted airspace. This cooperative control method eliminates the need for respective pre-planned trajectories, reduces communication requirements, and achieves a high level of intelligence. Simulation results show that the proposed behavior-based UAV swarm cooperative control method is able to make the fixed-wing UAV swarm, which is faster and unable to hover, fly along the virtual tube airspace under various virtual tube shapes and different swarm sizes, and the spacing between the UAVs is larger than the minimum safe distance during the flight.

Airborne directed energy weapons are one of the decisive factors to gain asymmetric advantages in future offensive and defensive confrontations. To address the problem of multiple constraints of the position, flight direction and bank attitude of the plane symmetrical aircraft under the requirement of effective damage to the target caused by directed energy load, a multiple constraint maneuvering guidance strategy with specified direction and attitude is proposed based on lateral acceleration compensation. The mission scenario of airborne directed energy loads attacking ground targets is described, and the maneuvering laws as well as constraints of position, flight direction and bank attitude of the plane symmetrical aircraft restricted by directed energy load are revealed. Based on the kinematic model and the multiple constraints such as position, specified direction and attitude of plane symmetrical aircrafts, the maneuvering guidance strategy of “virtual guidance- specified attitude attack” is designed to coordinate the imposed time and conditions of each constraint, which helps avoid the problem of command solution difficulty caused by excessive constraints. The coupling correlation characteristics existing in all constraints are analyzed, and a specified direction virtual guidance mechanism is proposed to guide the aircraft to the target on the specified course. On this basis, a specified direction and attitude maneuvering strategy with lateral acceleration compensation is proposed to actively generate the lateral acceleration for realizing dynamic balance of the aircraft, which can ensure that the plane symmetrical aircraft can simultaneously satisfy and maintain the heading angle as well as the bank angle constraints required for the normal operation of the directed energy load, and the directed energy load has sufficient irradiation time. The simulation results indicate that the proposed maneuvering guidance strategy based on lateral acceleration compensation can meet the requirements of the guidance mission with specified direction and attitude of the plane symmetrical aircraft restricted by directed energy load, and can provide certain reference for supporting the practical application of airborne directed energy weapons.

The cooperative attack of clustered aircraft can increase the overall combat effectiveness, however, the dense flight of aircraft faces the flight safety problem caused by the wing wake vortex. Aiming at the aerodynamic coupling effect of the wake vortex in the process of cluster cooperative attack, which can cause the flight safety problem caused by the neighboring aircraft generating too large induced rolling moment, a cooperative attack strategy under the effect of wing wake vortex that can meet the safety constraints of the flight of the aircraft cluster is proposed. A dangerous area model of the wing wake vortex effect during the dense flight of aircraft clusters is established, and the induced speed of the wake vortex and its resulting induced roll moment law are analyzed, on which a wake vortex dangerous area avoidance maneuver strategy based on an improved artificial potential field repulsive function is designed. Based on the consistency error variable of the estimated attack time, the distributed time cooperative guidance law is designed, which ensures that the attack time of all the aircraft can reach the consistency within a finite time, and give a stability proof for the attack time error of the system based on the Lyapunov stability theory. The simulation results show that the proposed cooperative attack strategy considering the flight safety constraints of the wake vortex effect can effectively reduce the influence of the wake vortex interference during the dense flight of the vehicles, which not only ensures the safety of the flight of the aircraft cluster, but also ensures the temporal and spatial consistency of the cooperative attack of the cluster.

In the face of the development of air defense and missile defense interception technologies and equipment, attack aircraft are confronted with issues such as low battlefield survivability and poor effectiveness due to the interception by defensive weapons. To address the aircraft penetration game and countermeasures problem under the interception scenario, this research proposes an intelligent maneuvering penetration guidance strategy for aircraft that considers the limitations of the interceptor detection capabilities. Initially, the interceptor's line-of-sight angle and detection range are defined, and the relative motion relationship between the interceptor and the attack aircraft is used to describe the evolution of the confrontation situation between the attack and the defense sides. Subsequently, a proximal policy optimization guidance method is designed based on the principles of deep reinforcement learning, constructing a Markov decision chain that guides the aircraft to actively evade the interceptor's detection, and further optimizing the aircraft's reward function design method to achieve precise targeting. On this basis, the convergence speed of the intelligent algorithm is addressed by introducing action exploration and generalized advantage functions. Simulation results show that the intelligent maneuvering penetration guidance strategy endows the aircraft with autonomous learning and optimization attributes, allowing it to increase the difficulty of detection for the interceptor through active evasive maneuvers, ultimately breaking through the detection capability limit of the interceptor to achieve penetration and escape. Compared with the traditional PN-sin penetration guidance method, the penetration guidance strategy proposed in this paper can maintain a higher penetration success rate in scenarios where the attack and defense sides have asymmetric maneuvering capabilities.