Reactive 3D deployment of a flying robotic network for surveillance of mobile targets

The paper considers deploying a flying robotic network to monitor mobile targets in an area of interest for a specific time period. Each flying robot carries a battery with limited initial energy and a camera with a fixed visible angle. When the energy consumption of a flying robot depends on its altitude, minimizing the energy consumption and maximizing the number of covered targets are two contradictory goals because to have a larger coverage area, a flying robot needs to fly higher, which leads to more energy consumption. Thus, there should be a balance between them. A constrained optimization problem accounting these two objectives is formulated subject to some energy and connectivity constraints. A control system containing a movement decision maker (MDM) is designed. A decentralized navigation algorithm implemented on each robot is proposed. The algorithm navigates each flying robot to a new position in 3D space that contributes more to the coverage. The performance of the proposed approach against some baseline methods is validated by extensive simulations. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.