Simulation of Communication Systems: The Key to Coordinated Control of Aircraft Swarms
As aerospace technology continues to evolve, aircraft have entountered technical bottlenecks in areas such as launch, propulsion, and control. Enhancing overall performance solely through the improvement of individual capabilities is no longer feasible. Coupled with challenges from complex environments, dynamic demands, and uncertain strategies, aircraft swarms have emerged as a disruptive innovation and a research focus over the past decade.
Aircraft swarms, characterized by high resilience, low cost, and flexible organization, leverage coordinated control technologies to drive systematic and intelligent development. In missions such as coordinated detection and interference, they achieve a "1+1>2" effect. However, current coordinated control of aircraft swarms faces several challenges due to technical limitations:
1.State Uncertainty and Time Constraints:
Coordinated control must operate under strong coupling constraints, integrating resources across multiple domains—such as time, frequency, capability, and information—on distributed platforms. To achieve reliable detection, accurate identification, and stable tracking under complex and dynamic conditions, it is essential to seamlessly fuse these domain resources.
2.Challenging Operational Conditions:
Aircraft swarms must adapt to high dynamics and low signal-to-noise ratios, using collaborative perception to navigate complex electromagnetic environments. They need to autonomously generate and optimize strategies while ensuring reliable, real-time, secure, and precise communication and information sharing both within and between aircraft.
To address the challenges of complex and volatile environments, the development and application of aircraft swarm systems require innovative approaches. Unlike traditional aircraft development, the focus of aircraft swarms extends beyond the physical domain to include the information and cognitive domains. Consequently, their control systems primarily involve three layers: the individual motion layer, the multi-body coordination layer, and the mission decision-making layer.
▲Aircraft Swarm Control System Architecture
In multi-aircraft coordinated control systems, how the subsystems work together to achieve coordination is a core issue to be addressed during the design of multi-aircraft coordination. The networking and communication between each layer is the foundation for coordinated operations in aircraft swarms. Aircraft can exchange target information, environmental data, and coordination information via information networks, and may also connect to command and control centers. These systems need to possess capabilities such as fast response and strong anti-jamming resistance to ensure unified control and information feedback for the swarm. Moreover, based on changes in situational information, real-time adjustments of each aircraft are made according to decision results.
Due to the embedded nature of aircraft swarm control and limited hardware resources, traditional development methods no longer meet the communication development needs of aircraft. To address the challenges caused by this, a simulation platform should be used for the construction and testing of the aircraft communication system to establish a comprehensive coordination performance evaluation system.
SkyEye, a fully digital real-time simulation software developed by Tianmu, provides simulation and verification capabilities for multi-aircraft coordination performance evaluation. SkyEye offers data transmission monitoring for aircraft communication software development and testing, displaying the communication processes between nodes and capturing hardware details of each communication phase, such as processor registers, memory, and device registers. This significantly improves testing efficiency. Additionally, SkyEye supports heterogeneous simulation of multiple CPUs, with the entire system being completed by a collaboration of ARM, DSP, and FPGA.
▲Aircraft Communication System Simulation
This figure illustrates a simulation case of the aircraft communication system using SkyEye. The case demonstrates how SkyEye facilitates the modeling, testing, and evaluation of multi-aircraft communication, enabling efficient data transmission, real-time monitoring, and performance analysis. The simulation highlights the communication processes between various aircraft nodes, showcasing the capabilities of the system in handling complex communication scenarios and optimizing coordination within the aircraft swarm.
