Surveillance of unmanned aerial vehicles using probability collectives

Abstract

A rising deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles in complex environment operations requires advanced coordination and planning methods. We address the problem of multi-UAV-based area surveillance and collision avoidance. The surveillance problem contains non-linear components and non-linear constraints which makes the optimization problem a hard one. We propose discretization of the problem based on the definition of the points of interest and time steps to reduce its complexity. The objective function integrates both the area surveillance and collision avoidance sub-problems. The optimization task is solved using a probability collection solver that allows to distribute computation of the optimization. We have implemented the probability collective solver as a multi-agent simulation. The results show the approach can be used for this problem. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.