Asymptotically Optimal Deployment of Drones for Surveillance and Monitoring

This paper studies the problem of placing a set of drones for surveillance of a ground region. The main goal is to determine the minimum number of drones necessary to be deployed at a given altitude to monitor the region. An easily implementable algorithm to estimate the minimum number of drones and determine their locations is developed. Moreover, it is proved that this algorithm is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the ratio of the number of drones required by this algorithm and the minimum number of drones converges to one as the area of the ground region tends to infinity. The proof is based on Kershner’s theorem from combinatorial geometry. Illustrative examples and comparisons with other existing methods show the efficiency of the developed algorithm.

[1]  Mahbub Hassan,et al.  Flying Drone Base Stations for Macro Hotspots , 2018, IEEE Access.

[2]  R. Kershner.  The Number of Circles Covering a Set , 1939 .

[3]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  Proactive Deployment of Aerial Drones for Coverage over Very Uneven Terrains: A Version of the 3D Art Gallery Problem , 2019, Sensors.

[4]  Tahiry Razafindralambo,et al.  Optimization of mobile sensor coverage with UAVs , 2018, IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS).

[5]  Tahiry Razafindralambo,et al.  Efficient deployment of connected unmanned aerial vehicles for optimal target coverage , 2017, 2017 Global Information Infrastructure and Networking Symposium (GIIS).

[6]  Dimitrios Zorbas,et al.  Modelling the mobile target covering problem using flying drones , 2016, Optim. Lett..

[7]  Sungwoo Kim,et al.  Traveling Salesman Problem With a Drone Station , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[8]  Franziska Hoffmann,et al.  Spatial Tessellations Concepts And Applications Of Voronoi Diagrams , 2016 .

[9]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Convex Optimization , 2004, Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook.

[10]  Halim Yanikomeroglu,et al.  Strategic Densification With UAV-BSs in Cellular Networks , 2018, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

[11]  Ebrahim Saberinia,et al.  OFDM Performance Assessment for Traffic Surveillance in Drone Small Cells , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[12]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  Towards the Internet of Flying Robots: A Survey , 2018, Sensors.

[13]  Alan T. Murray,et al.  A range-restricted recharging station coverage model for drone delivery service planning , 2018 .

[14]  Rui Zhang,et al.  Placement Optimization of UAV-Mounted Mobile Base Stations , 2016, IEEE Communications Letters.

[15]  Xianbin Cao,et al.  Proactive Drone-Cell Deployment: Overload Relief for a Cellular Network Under Flash Crowd Traffic , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

[16]  A. Matveev,et al.  Algorithms for collision-free navigation of mobile robots in complex cluttered environments: a survey , 2014, Robotica.

[17]  Evsen Yanmaz.  Connectivity versus area coverage in unmanned aerial vehicle networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).

[18]  Khaled A. Harras,et al.  Mobile Target Coverage and Tracking on Drone-Be-Gone UAV Cyber-Physical Testbed , 2018, IEEE Systems Journal.

[19]  Sebastian Magierowski,et al.  Vehicle Routing Problems for Drone Delivery , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[20]  Halim Yanikomeroglu,et al.  Backhaul-aware robust 3D drone placement in 5G+ wireless networks , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops (ICC Workshops).

[21]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  Safe Robot Navigation Among Moving and Steady Obstacles , 2015 .

[22]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  An Algorithm of Efficient Proactive Placement of Autonomous Drones for Maximum Coverage in Cellular Networks , 2018, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

[23]  Anthony Tzes,et al.  Distributed infrastructure inspection path planning for aerial robotics subject to time constraints , 2016, 2016 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

[24]  Martin Saska,et al.  Autonomous Compact Monitoring of Large Areas Using Micro Aerial Vehicles with Limited Sensory Information and Computational Resources , 2018, MESAS.

[25]  Zhenyu Zhou,et al.  Energy-Efficient Industrial Internet of UAVs for Power Line Inspection in Smart Grid , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.

[26]  Haitao Zhao,et al.  Deployment Algorithms for UAV Airborne Networks Toward On-Demand Coverage , 2018, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[27]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  An Algorithm of Reactive Collision Free 3-D Deployment of Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Surveillance and Monitoring , 2020, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.

[28]  Kellen Petersen August.  Real Analysis , 2009 .

[29]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  A Method for Optimized Deployment of a Network of Surveillance Aerial Drones , 2019, IEEE Systems Journal.

[30]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  A strategy for safe 3D navigation of non-holonomic robots among moving obstacles , 2017, Robotica.

[31]  Konstantinos Kanistras,et al.  A survey of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for traffic monitoring , 2013, 2013 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

[32]  Kwang-Cheng Chen,et al.  Efficient 3D Placement of Access Points in an Aerial Wireless Network , 2019, 2019 16th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC).

[33]  Martin Saska,et al.  Documentation of dark areas of large historical buildings by a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles using model predictive control , 2017, 2017 22nd IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA).

[34]  Rita Ambu,et al.  Advanced 3D Photogrammetric Surface Reconstruction of Extensive Objects by UAV Camera Image Acquisition , 2018, Sensors.

[35]  Tran Hiep Dinh,et al.  Enhanced discrete particle swarm optimization path planning for UAV vision-based surface inspection , 2017, ArXiv.

[36]  Ming Chen,et al.  Joint Altitude, Beamwidth, Location, and Bandwidth Optimization for UAV-Enabled Communications , 2018, IEEE Communications Letters.

[37]  Luciano Bononi,et al.  Joint Coverage, Connectivity, and Charging Strategies for Distributed UAV Networks , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[38]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Base Stations for Optimal Quality of Coverage , 2019, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

[39]  Andrey V. Savkin,et al.  A Method for Optimized Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Maximum Coverage and Minimum Interference in Cellular Networks , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.

[40]  George J. Vachtsevanos,et al.  Military and Civilian Unmanned Aircraft , 2015 .