Cooperative UAV Trajectory Planning for Plume Wrapping of a Spherical Dome

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are surging in popularity as a result of the versatility of their usage. Research has focused on a variety of applications by UAV groups including surveillance, target tracking, network coverage and mapping of various areas or incidents. Autonomous UAVs can be utilized to perform tasks which may be potentially dangerous for human intervention. Earlier work has shown that a group of UAVs can successfully circumscribe a plume of hazardous contaminants in the air and map the boundary of such a spill. In this paper, we show that this idea can be extended to plumes which contain elements heavier than air and, as such, fall to the ground such that they approximately form a spherical dome. Mapping such a boundary is challenging because UAVs need to follow the plume as close to the ground as possible without crashing. Our results prove that a UAV platoon can successfully communicate and coordinate amongst themselves in order to surround such a leak.