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.

UAV trajectory prediction is the core technology for autonomous UAV flight and is a prerequisite for control and navigation. In this paper, the UAV flight path prediction model is established by collecting the flight data of the actual UAV. Firstly, the UAV flight information collection and data preprocessing are carried out; Secondly, the UAV flight state recognition model is established based on the PCA-SVM model to identify five UAV flight states; Finally, the flight path prediction model of UAV based on flight state recognition is established, and the neural network model is established based on the flight path of five flight state recognition. The experimental results show that: 1) The accuracy of UAV flight state recognition based on PCA-SVM is more than 90%. 2) The average prediction error of the traditional neural network UAV trajectory is 0.422m, and the maximum error of the circling state is 0.84m. 3) The average prediction error of the UAV flight path based on flight state recognition is 0.214m, and the maximum error of the circling state is 0.41m. The model error is less than 0.5m. The results show that the prediction model with flight state recognition has significantly less error than the direct UAV trajectory prediction, and the prediction model with flight state recognition predicts better than the traditional Unscented Kalman Filter method.

The Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm is recognized for its simplicity and ease of implementation, and has become a preferred method for solving global optimization problems due to its adaptability and search capabilities. Despite these advantages, existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) path planning algorithms are often hindered by slow convergence rates, susceptibility to local optima, and limited robustness. To surpass these limitations, we enhance the application of GWO in UAV path planning by improving its trajectory evaluation function, convergence factor, and position update method. We propose a collaborative UAV path planning model that includes constraint analysis and an evaluation function. Subsequently, an Enhanced Grey Wolf Optimizer model (NI–GWO) is introduced, which optimizes the convergence coefficient using a nonlinear function and integrates the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) algorithm into the model based on the fitness of individual wolves, enabling it to perform dynamic obstacle avoidance tasks. In the final stage, a UAV path planning simulation platform is employed to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the original and improved algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NI–GWO algorithm can effectively solve the path planning problem for UAVs in uncertain environments. Compared to Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), GWO, and MP–GWO algorithms, the NI–GWO algorithm can achieve the optimal fitness value and has significant advantages in terms of average path length, time, number of collisions, and obstacle avoidance capabilities.

The zero-sum matrix game is one of the most classic game models, and it is widely used in many scientific and engineering fields. In the real world, due to the complexity of the decision-making environment, sometimes the payoffs received by players may be inexact or uncertain, which requires that the model of matrix games has the ability to represent and deal with imprecise payoffs. To meet such a requirement, this paper develops a zero-sum matrix game model with Dempster–Shafer belief structure payoffs, which effectively represents the ambiguity involved in payoffs of a game. Then, a decomposition method is proposed to calculate the value of such a game, which is also expressed with belief structures. Moreover, for the possible computation-intensive issue in the proposed decomposition method, as an alternative solution, a Monte Carlo simulation approach is presented, as well. Finally, the proposed zero-sum matrix games with payoffs of Dempster–Shafer belief structures is illustratively applied to the sensor selection and intrusion detection of sensor networks, which shows its effectiveness and application process.

With the rapid changes in the battlefield situation, the requirement of time for UAV groups to deal with complex tasks is getting higher, which puts forward higher requirements for the dynamic allocation of the UAV group. However, most of the existing methods focus on task pre-allocation, and the research on dynamic task allocation technology during task execution is not sufficient. Aiming at the high real-time requirement of the multi-UAV collaborative dynamic task allocation problem, this paper introduces the market auction mechanism to design a discrete particle swarm algorithm based on particle quality clustering by a hybrid architecture. The particle subpopulations are dynamically divided based on particle quality, which changes the topology of the algorithm. The market auction mechanism is introduced during particle initialization and task coordination to build high-quality particles. The algorithm is verified by constructing two emergencies of UAV sudden failure and a new emergency task.

With the impact of artificial intelligence on the traditional UAV industry, autonomous UAV flight has become a popular research field at present. Based on the demand for research on key technologies for autonomous UAV flight, this paper studies UAV flight state recognition. This paper is based on multi-sensor acquisition of UAV on-board information, and uses the collected information for data fusion to complete UAV flight state identification. Firstly, UAV flight data acquisition and data preprocessing are carried out; secondly, UAV flight trajectory features are extracted based on multidimensional data fusion; finally, UAV flight state recognition model based on PCA-DAGSVM model is established. The results show that the algorithm based on multi-sensor data fusion has good recognition effect in the UAV flight state recognition problem. The recognition accuracy of the algorithm exceeds that of the random forest model, and its accuracy in the training set of UAV flight state recognition is more than 90%, and its accuracy in the test set is more than 80%.