PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2022, Engineering and Applied Science: Electrical Engineering

Supremacy in armed conflict comes not merely from superiority in capability or numbers but from how assets are used, down to the maneuvers of individual vehicles and munitions. This document outlines a research plan focused on skirmish-level tactics to militarily relevant scenarios. Skirmish-level refers to both the size of the adversarial engagement -- generally one vs. one, two vs. one, and/or one vs. two -- as well as the fact that the goal or objective of each team is well-established. The problem areas include pursuit-evasion and target guarding, either of which may be considered as sub-problems within military missions such as air-to-air combat, suppression/defense of ground-based assets, etc. In most cases, the tactics considered are comprised of the control policy of the agents (i.e., their spatial maneuvers), but may also include role assignment (e.g, whether to act as a decoy or striker) as well as discrete decisions (e.g., whether to engage or retreat). Skirmish-level tactics are important because they can provide insight into how to approach larger scale conflicts (many vs. many, many objectives, many decisions). Machine learning approaches such as reinforcement learning and neural networks have been demonstrated to be capable of developing controllers for large teams of agents. However, the performance of these controllers compared to the optimal (or equilibrium) policies is generally unknown. Differential Game Theory provides the means to obtain a rigorous solution to relevant scenarios in the form of saddle-point equilibrium control policies and the min/max (or max/min) cost / reward in the case of zero-sum games. When the equilibrium control policies can be obtained analytically, they are suitable for onboard / real-time implementation. Some challenges associated with the classical Differential Game Theory approach are explored herein. These challenges arise mainly due to the presence of singularities, which may appear in even the simplest differenti (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Zachariah Fuchs Ph.D. (Committee Member); David Casbeer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Dieter Vanderelst Ph.D. (Committee Member); Meir Pachter Ph.D. (Committee Member); John Gallagher Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Electrical Engineering