Optimizing Energy Consumption of the UAV Swarm Performing Coverage Task with Stochastic Sweep Coverage Control Algorithm

Rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are commonly used today. Their versatility helps researchers and engineers to find a wide variety of implementations for those objects. A specific branch of research focuses on UAV swarms, which is valuable when the mission is distributed over a large area. Research regarding swarms mainly focuses on the theoretical part, a control algorithm that defines how the UAVs in the swarm navigate through space. The practical part is also crucial as it helps to evaluate how a swarm of robots would behave in real-life space. In this article, a method was presented that allows the evaluation of the total energy consumption for a UAV swarm during the mission of area coverage. The control algorithm was a stochastic sweep coverage. Also, some solutions were presented to optimize the performance of the swarm.