Cooperative Large Area Surveillance with a Team of Aerial Mobile Robots for Long Endurance Missions

This paper proposes a distributed approach to solve long duration area surveillance missions with a team of aerial robots, taking into account communication constraints. The system, based on “one-to-one” coordination, minimizes the probability that any event happens in the area without being detected and ensures periodic communication between UAVs. A set of simulations are presented to validate the applicability of the approach and its most relevant features: convergence, robustness with dynamic teams, fault-tolerance and finite information sharing time. It is also shown that “one-to-one” coordination for all the pairs of neighbors allows to obtain an efficient coordination scheme for the whole team to accomplish the area surveillance mission without any central unit.

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