Distributed Cooperation of Multiple UAVs for Area Monitoring Missions

Monitoring and surveillance is a very relevant issue in recent years where the use of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offers interesting advantages. In this kind of mission, assuming that there is no “a priori” information about the location or time of the events or intruders to detect, a frequency-based criterion seems to be an interesting approach to solve the problem. This chapter describes a frequency-based approach applied to a cooperative area monitoring problem using a team of UAVs. Three different cooperative patrolling strategies (cyclic, path partitioning and area partitioning) are analyzed and compared with respect to refresh and latency times criteria. Finally, assuming communication constraints, a distributed implementation is required and convergence to the centralized cooperative patrolling strategy should be ensured. Two different distributed techniques are described: one-to-one coordination and a method based on coordination variables. Both techniques are compared from a convergence complexity criterion.