Radar Cross-Section Shadowing: Novel Task Sharing Concept for Manned-Unmanned Teaming

Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) is of increasing importance in the modern aerospace arena. In this context, task-sharing between humans and autonomous systems withstands as an open research area. Motivated by this challenge, this study proposes a novel task-sharing concept, i.e. radar cross-section (RCS) shadowing - aimed at reducing the vulnerability of a non-stealth manned aircraft in a contested, hostile environment by concealing it with a stealth unmanned autonomous wing-man. For this purpose, the leader (manned) and wing-man (unmanned) aircraft are primarily represented as triangles approximating their shapes. The wing-man's projected shadow onto the leader's triangular representation defines the masked region. To ensure full coverage, a reference command generation strategy is designed for the position channels (north, east, and altitude), guiding the wing-man's motion. Additionally, the leader's reference commands are determined based on the center of the shadow triangle to enhance coverage reliability. As a final step, the control architecture employs identical Lyapunovbased position controllers for both aircraft. The efficacy of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through two distinct scenarios, showing that the leader is successfully shadowed during the mandatory radar penetration maneuver, thereby significantly reducing radar visibility.