Decentralized Covert and Collaborative Radio Surveillance on a Group of Mobile Ground Nodes by a UAV Swarm

This paper considers using UAVs to carry out an active and collaborative radio surveillance on a group of ground mobile nodes while disguising the surveillance intention. The UAVs try to prevent being visually noticed by the nodes, and a new measure to quantify the disguising performance is proposed. We formulate a new trajectory optimization problem to maximize the new disguising metric subject to an uninterrupted surveillance requirement and the collision avoidance and the aeronautic maneuverability of the UAVs. A model predictive control (MPC) based scheme is developed. Computer simulations and comparisons with a random trajectory construction method show that the proposed method guarantees the surveillance performance without the loss of disguising performance.