Control of Flying Robots for Monitoring of Moving Objects

The paper considers using a set of flying robots to monitor mobile targets in an area of interest for a specific time period. Each robot carries a camera with a fixed visible angle and its battery capacity is limited. When the energy consumption of a robot depends on its altitude, the energy consumption and the number of covered targets are two contradictory objectives as a larger coverage area means a higher altitude, which leads to more energy consumption. Thus, there should be a balance between them. A constrained optimization problem accounting these objectives is formulated subject to some energy and connectivity constraints. A control system containing a movement decision maker is designed. A decentralized navigation algorithm implemented on each robot is proposed. The algorithm navigates each flying robot to a new position in 3D space that contributes more to the coverage. The performance of the proposed approach against some baseline methods is validated by extensive simulations.