Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 1472: A Cooperative Search and Coverage Algorithm with Controllable Revisit and Connectivity Maintenance for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 1472: A Cooperative Search and Coverage Algorithm with Controllable Revisit and Connectivity Maintenance for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Sensors doi: 10.3390/s18051472 Authors: Zhong Liu Xiaoguang Gao Xiaowei Fu In this paper, we mainly study a cooperative search and coverage algorithm for a given bounded rectangle region, which contains several unknown stationary targets, by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with non-ideal sensors and limited communication ranges. Our goal is to minimize the search time, while gathering more information about the environment and finding more targets. For this purpose, a novel cooperative search and coverage algorithm with controllable revisit mechanism is presented. Firstly, as the representation of the environment, the cognitive maps that included the target probability map (TPM), the uncertain map (UM), and the digital pheromone map (DPM) are constituted. We also design a distributed update and fusion scheme for the cognitive map. This update and fusion scheme can guarantee that each one of the cognitive maps converges to the same one, which reflects the targets’ true existence or absence in each cell of the search region. Secondly, we develop a controllable revisit mechanism based on the DPM. This mechanism can concentrate the UAVs to revisit sub-areas that have a large target probability or high uncertainty. Thirdly, in the frame of distributed receding horizon optimizing, a...
Source: Sensors - Category: Biotechnology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research