VISIT: Placement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Anisotropic Monitoring Tasks

This paper considers the fundamental problem of placement of Unmanned Aerial VehIcles for aniSotropic monItoring Tasks (VISIT). That is, given a set of objects on 2D area, place a fixed number of UAVs by adjusting their coordinates and orientations subject to Gaussian bias, such that the overall monitoring utility for all objects is maximized. We develop a theoretical framework to address VISIT. First, we establish the monitoring model whose quality of monitoring (QoM) is anisotropy with respect to monitoring angle and monitoring distance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to consider anisotropic QoM. Then, we propose an algorithm consisting of area discretization and Monitoring Dominating Set (MDS) extraction, to reduce the infinite solution space to a limited one without performance loss. Finally, we prove that the reformulated problem can be modeled as maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a matroid constraint and present a greedy algorithm with 1−1/e−ϵ approximation ratio to address it. We conduct both simulations and field experiments to evaluate our algorithm, and the results show that our algorithm outperforms comparison algorithms by at least 41.3%.