Surveillance of Uneven Surface with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or Drones are of massive interest in monitoring large areas with uneven surfaces or managing large events such as protests while ensuring civil security and public safety. A common requirement for this needs the UAVs to cover each point within the area of interest. In general, the region of interest is modeled as a surface, and thus we focus on surveillance of a surface with a random connected distribution of drones. This paper focuses on developing distributed algorithms for the reorganization of drones from the initial deployment to maximize the covered area without holes. In addition, the target is to provide a compact coverage to minimize the diameter of the network formed by the drones, which helps in faster communications. We propose two algorithms based on Local Voronoi and Virtual Force. Extensive simulation studies show that our proposed techniques result in hole-free maximal compact coverage with limited displacement.