Reinforcement Learning for Decision-Level Interception Prioritization in Drone Swarm Defense
This work addresses the critical challenge of rapid decision-making for defense systems against low-cost kamikaze drone swarms, though it is presented as a case study with incremental application of existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of prioritizing interceptions in drone swarm defense by developing a reinforcement learning agent that coordinates multiple effectors to protect high-value zones, achieving lower average damage and higher defensive efficiency compared to a rule-based baseline in simulated attack scenarios.
The growing threat of low-cost kamikaze drone swarms poses a critical challenge to modern defense systems demanding rapid and strategic decision-making to prioritize interceptions across multiple effectors and high-value target zones. In this work, we present a case study demonstrating the practical advantages of reinforcement learning in addressing this challenge. We introduce a high-fidelity simulation environment that captures realistic operational constraints, within which a decision-level reinforcement learning agent learns to coordinate multiple effectors for optimal interception prioritization. Operating in a discrete action space, the agent selects which drone to engage per effector based on observed state features such as positions, classes, and effector status. We evaluate the learned policy against a handcrafted rule-based baseline across hundreds of simulated attack scenarios. The reinforcement learning based policy consistently achieves lower average damage and higher defensive efficiency in protecting critical zones. This case study highlights the potential of reinforcement learning as a strategic layer within defense architectures, enhancing resilience without displacing existing control systems. All code and simulation assets are publicly released for full reproducibility, and a video demonstration illustrates the policy's qualitative behavior.