Chaotic artificial bee colony approach to Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) path planning

Path planning of Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) is a rather complicated global optimum problem which is about seeking a superior flight route considering the different kinds of constrains under complex combat field environment. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a new optimization method motivated by the intelligent behavior of honey bees. In this paper, we propose an improved ABC optimization algorithm based on chaos theory for solving the UCAV path planning in various combat field environments, and the implementation procedure of our proposed chaotic ABC approach is also described in detail. Series of experimental comparison results are presented to show the feasibility, effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.