Exhaustive mobile target search and non-intrusive reconnaissance using cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper presents a novel pattern for the trajectories that a team of cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) adopt to perform an exhaustive search of mobile targets in a specified area. The proposed moving pattern also creates a safe area into which no target is able to intrude. The Progressively Spiral Out (PSO) path is developed to describe the proposed moving pattern, which can be applied to any number of UAVs. It also shows that the radius of the resulting non-intrusive defensible border grows proportionally to the number of UAVs. The performance of the proposed PSO path is tested against a baseline raster path in simulation. The simulation results show that the PSO path outperforms the baseline path on both time to detection and successful rate of defending attacks toward the non-intrusive region.