Divide and Survey: Observability Through Multi-Drone City Roadway Coverage

Abstract

Deploying autonomous drone systems in smart cities to identify unexpected events and adapt rapidly to crises has a great potential for optimizing city operations and increasing city-wide situational awareness. This work presents an algorithmic technique, Postman Moving Voronoi Coverage (PMVC), which effectively distributes and plans coverage routes for each drone agent. PMVC divides city roadways into similarly sized subregions based on system limitations for many types of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The findings describe trade-offs a city must make between drone types, number of systems, and the desired speed of city-wide road network traversal. Often, employing more low capacity drones are more cost and time effective for city coverage.