Rectilinear Workspace Partitioning for Parallel Coverage Using Multiple UAVs

Given a planar workpiece , the objective of region coverage is to find an ordered list of waypoints and the geometry of paths between consecutive waypoints along which the centroid of a sensor footprint can be moved to efficiently trace a minimal superset of . We consider the problem of maximally parallelizing the coverage of a contiguous rectilinear region represented by R R R ∈ ℘ by dividing ℘ amongst η unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The rates at which the UAVs can do region coverage may differ. An optimum solution to this problem comprises a decomposition of ℘ into η parts such that the cost of covering a part using UAV i C i is in proportion to its relative capability. This problem however is NP-hard and we instead give a polynomial time algorithm that solves a closely related problem: divide ℘ into η parts that are each rectilinear, contiguous and, whose areas are in the ratio of relative capabilities of the UAVs. Each part is then assigned to the corresponding UAV for coverage. We prove that our algorithm runs in ) log ( N N N O η + time.