Toward Decentralised Consensus and Offloading for Area Coverage in a Fleet of Drones

Abstract

A precise and dynamic visual coverage of a given area is an essential task in many smart contexts, ranging from civil communities to military applications. Due to the last years advancement in hardware miniaturization and efficiency, area coverage is often performed with a combination of static and moving devices, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). Drones are useful to cope with the highly unpredictability and dynamicity of environments, but require specific and efficient solutions toward and efficient area coverage. In this paper we proposes an initial work toward a drone-based approach for the task of area coverage. In particular, we focus our analysis on the following points: (i) decentralized consensus for movement planning, and (ii) the integration of cloud computing infrastructures and technologies for computation offloading, both for image analysis and movement planning.