A novel trajectory prediction method for UAV air combat based on QCNet-3D

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory prediction is an important research topic in the field of UAV air combat. In order to address the problem of single-feature extraction scale and scene adaptability in UAV air combat trajectory prediction algorithms, this paper proposes an innovative UAV trajectory prediction method QCNet-3D, which can predict the future trajectory of the target UAV and provide the corresponding possibility. Firstly, the UAV trajectory prediction is modeled based on the mixture of Laplace distributions, and the UAV's kinetic equations are employed to construct the UAV trajectory prediction dataset (UAVTP dataset), ensuring high reliability. Secondly, two improvement methods are proposed on the basis of QCNet: multi-scale Fourier mapping and three-dimensional adaptation. The ablation study shows that the improvement methods have reduced the minimum average displacement error, minimum final displacement error, and missing rate by 55.4%, 54.3%, and 68.1% respectively. Finally, QCNet-3D is proposed based on the two improvement methods, and the simulation experiment confirm the proposed algorithm's capability to predict both simple and complex UAV maneuvers, offering the possibility for each predicted trajectory under various prediction future steps and output modes.