Information sharing in UAVs cooperative search based on calculating the minimum time

Abstract

This paper proposes an optimization strategy for sharing and merging information of target's existence in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperative search. That main is to minimize the search time subject to both sensing and communication limitations. We derive limits for the required number of sensor observations considering false alarms and miss detections, to declare the existence or absence of a target. the search environment is partitioned into equal-size cells, where each cell is associated with a probability of target existence and the number of visits by the UAVs, wich constitutes a probability map (search map) and a visit map (certainty map). We present a decentralized control model for cooperative target-searching and we develop a real-time approach for direct cooperation between vehicles, which is based on calculating the minimum time required to reach a cell. Each UAV takes into account the possible actions of other UAVs to increase the overall information about the environment. The simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy by comparing it with the free moving strategy and show that our proposed algorithm performs out it.