A quantitative evaluation method of surveillance coverage of UAVs swarm

Abstract

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have native advantages in wide area surveillance. Pursuing the spreading of the UAV swarm as dispersive as possible is an effective method of improve the performance of surveillance. In this paper, quality of deployment issue is surveyed and analyzed in term of a novel measure - deployment entropy. The idea of deployment entropy comes from Shannon’s information entropy. Deployment entropy could help operators to obtain the whole understanding of the interested region from describing the circumstances of every sub region. The more dispersive UAVs are deployed, the greater the deployment entropy we can get. From numerical simulation, results show that by computing the value of deployment entropy, it is possible to evaluate the distribution of UAVs in a wide area, and the burden of calculation is less than traditional evaluation method.