Technical Report: Optimal Surveillance of Dynamic Parades using Teams of Aerial Robots

TL;DR

This report presents an algorithm for optimally deploying aerial robots to surveil a dynamic parade route in urban environments, maximizing coverage and handling occlusions with scalable computational performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization algorithm for aerial robot placement that maximizes minimum coverage along a dynamic parade route considering occlusions.

Findings

Algorithm effectively maximizes route coverage.

Scalable computational performance demonstrated.

Suitable for urban surveillance scenarios.

Abstract

This technical report addresses the problem of optimal surveillance of the route followed by a dynamic parade using a team of aerial robots. The dynamic parade is considered to take place within an urban environment, it is discretized and at every iteration, the algorithm computes the best possible placing of the aerial robotic team members, subject to their camera model and the occlusions arising from the environment. As the parade route is only as well covered as its least-covered point, the optimization objective is to place the aerial robots such that they maximize the minimum coverage over the points in the route at every time instant of it. A set of simulation studies is used to demonstrate the operation and performance characteristics of the approach, while computational analysis is also provided and verifies the good scalability properties of the contributed algorithm regarding the size of the aerial robotics team.