Reactive 3D deployment of a flying robotic network for surveillance of mobile targets

The paper considers deploying a flying robotic network to monitor mobile targets in an area of interest for a specific time period. Each flying robot carries a battery with limited initial energy and a camera with a fixed visible angle. When the energy consumption of a flying robot depends on its altitude, minimizing the energy consumption and maximizing the number of covered targets are two contradictory goals because to have a larger coverage area, a flying robot needs to fly higher, which leads to more energy consumption. Thus, there should be a balance between them. A constrained optimization problem accounting these two objectives is formulated subject to some energy and connectivity constraints. A control system containing a movement decision maker (MDM) 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.