Maneuver Decision of UAV in Short-Range Air Combat Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the development of artificial intelligence and integrated sensor technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are more and more applied in the air combats. A bottleneck that constrains the capability of UAVs against manned vehicles is the autonomous maneuver decision, which is a very challenging problem in the short-range air combat undergoing highly dynamic and uncertain maneuvers of enemies. In this paper, an autonomous maneuver decision model is proposed for the UAV short-range air combat based on reinforcement learning, which mainly includes the aircraft motion model, one-to-one short-range air combat evaluation model and the maneuver decision model based on deep Q network (DQN). However, such model includes a high dimensional state and action space which requires huge computation load for DQN training using traditional methods. Then, a phased training method, called “basic-confrontation”, which is based on the idea that human beings gradually learn from simple to complex is proposed to help reduce the training time while getting suboptimal but efficient results. Finally, one-to-one short-range air combats are simulated under different target maneuver policies. Simulation results show that the proposed maneuver decision model and training method can help the UAV achieve autonomous decision in the air combats and obtain an effective decision policy to defeat the opponent.