Self-Organising UAVs for Wide Area Fault-tolerant Aerial Monitoring

This paper describes an algorithm for the coordination of a flock of multirotor UAVs which cooperate in performing a wide area monitoring mission. The key characteristics of the proposed approach are the self-organising ability and the decentralisation. The flock has the basic task of covering a certain area of terrain and is able to self-organise in order to (i) find a coverage of the area which minimises mission time, and (ii) identify possible faults in one or more multirotors, taking care of performing a re-scouting of proper terrain regions in order to avoid loss of data. The algorithms to ensure flocking formation and area coverage are described. They are also validated by means of simulation approach, which is performed using an adhoc software tool.