Coordinated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Surveillance of Targets
Abstract
This thesis investigates the coordination approaches of multiple mobile and
autonomous robots, especially resource-limited small-scale UAVs, for the
surveillance of pre-de ned ground targets in a given environment. A key
research issue in surveillance task is the coordination among the robots to
determine the target's time varying locations. The research focuses on two
applications of surveillance: (i) cooperative search of stationary targets, and
(ii) cooperative observation of moving targets. The objective in cooperative
search is to minimize the time and errors in nding the locations of
stationary targets. The objective of cooperative observation is to maximize
the collective time and quality of observation of moving targets.
The thesis presents a survey of the approaches in a larger domain of
multi-robot systems for the surveillance of pre-de ned targets in a given
environment. This survey identi es various factors and application scenarios
that a ect the performance of multi-robot surveillance systems. The
thesis proposes a distributed strategy for merging delayed and incomplete
information, which is a result of sensing and communication limitations,
collected by di erent UAVs. An analytic derivation of the number of required
observations is provided to declare the absence or existence of a
target in a region. This number of required observations is integrated into
an iterative use of Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Multiple
Travelling Salesmen Problem (MTSP) for autonomous path planning of
UAVs. Additionally, it performs an exploration of the algorithmic design
space and analyzes the e ects of centralized and distributed coordination
on the cooperative search of stationary targets in the presence of sensing
and communication limitations.
The thesis also proposes the application of UAVs for observing multiple
moving targets with di erent resolutions. A key contribution is to use the
quad-tree data-structure for modelling the environment and movement of
UAVs. This modelling has helped in the dynamic sensor placement of UAVs
to maximize the observation of the number of moving targets as well as the
resolution of observation.
Authors
Khan, AsifCollections
- Theses [3706]