Persistent multi-UAV surveillance with energy and communication constraints

Multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly applied for surveillance tasks such as disaster management and environmental monitoring. Due to limited battery capacity and bounded wireless communication, small-scale UAVs pose fundamental challenges for achieving persistence. We propose an offline path planning algorithm that ensures that the UAVs can always reach the base station to replace their batteries and that each UAV is always connected with the base station via a single or multi-hop link. We focus on heterogeneous UAVs with different flight times. The single base station scenario is compared with several extensions for multiple base stations based on the maximum time a sensing location has not been visited.