Cooperative Encirclement of Malicious UAVs in an Interspersed UAV Swarm

This paper presents a goal assignment strategy for encircling a malicious Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm, initially interspersed within a trusted UAV swarm. The proposed strategy leverages the construction of convex layers using the initial positions of the trusted UAVs and an associated angular region called the search space, which is defined as the region enclosed by the normals drawn to the supporting edges at the trusted UAV's position. Considering the malicious UAVs as obstacles, the search space for a trusted UAV is determined, which excludes the heading directions resulting in a collision with an obstacle. Further, an encircling boundary that encloses all UAVs at the initial time is defined and divided into equi-spaced sectors. The main contribution of this work is a goal assignment strategy that assigns a non-overlapping goal position and a collision-free path to each of the trusted UAVs to reach the encircling boundary within its search space. Simulation studies validate the efficacy of the proposed strategy.