Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tactical Maneuver Trajectory Prediction Based on Hierarchical Strategy in Air-to-Air Confrontation Scenarios

The prediction of the tactical maneuver trajectory of target aircraft is an important component of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomous air-to-air confrontation. In view of the shortcomings of low accuracy and poor real-time performance in the existing maneuver trajectory prediction methods, this paper establishes a hierarchical tactical maneuver trajectory prediction model to achieve maneuver trajectory prediction based on the prediction of target tactical maneuver intentions. First, extract the maneuver trajectory features and situation features from the above data to establish the classification rules of maneuver units. Second, a tactical maneuver unit prediction model is established using the deep echo-state network based on the auto-encoder with attention mechanism (DeepESN-AE-AM) to predict 21 basic maneuver units. Then, for the above-mentioned 21 basic maneuver units, establish a maneuver trajectory prediction model using the gate recurrent unit based on triangle search optimization with attention mechanism (TSO-GRU-AM). Finally, by integrating the above two prediction models, a hierarchical strategy is adopted to establish a tactical maneuver trajectory prediction model. A section of the confrontation trajectory is selected from the air-to-air confrontation simulation data for prediction, and the results show that the trajectory prediction error of the combination of DeepESN-AE-AM and TSO-GRU-AM is small and meets the accuracy requirements. The simulation results of three air-to-air confrontation scenarios show that the proposed trajectory prediction method helps to assist UAV in accurately judging the confrontational situation and selecting high-quality maneuver strategies.