Temporal Logic Planning for Minimum-Time Positioning of Multiple Threat-Seduction Decoys

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel control approach using temporal logic planning to coordinate multiple decoys for rapid threat lock-breaking, incorporating optimal assignment, collision avoidance, and uncertainty modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a temporal logic-based method for controlling multiple decoys with optimal threat assignment and collision avoidance under uncertainty, enabling minimum-time threat lock-breaking.

Findings

Decoys can be optimally assigned to threats for quick lock-breaking.

Collision avoidance is guaranteed through local position constraints.

The approach effectively handles decoy uncertainty in motion planning.

Abstract

Reusable decoys offer a cost-effective alternative to the single-use hardware commonly applied to protect surface assets from threats. Such decoys portray fake assets to lure threats away from the true asset. To deceive a threat, a decoy first has to position itself such that it can break the radar lock. Considering multiple simultaneous threats, this paper introduces an approach for controlling multiple decoys to minimise the time required to break the locks of all the threats. The method includes the optimal allocation of one decoy to every threat with an assignment procedure that provides local position constraints to guarantee collision avoidance and thereby decouples the control of the decoys. A crude model of a decoy with uncertainty is considered for motion planning. The task of a decoy reaching a state in which the lock of the assigned threat can be broken is formulated as a temporal logic specification. To this end, the requirements to complete the task are modelled as time-varying set-membership constraints. The temporal and logical combination of the constraints is encoded in a mixed-integer optimisation problem. To demonstrate the results a simulated case study is provided.