Improved Multi-Camera Coverage Control of Unmanned Multirotors

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming one of the most versatile robots working with various sensors such as camera, Lidar and GPS. This trend comes from the numerous studies in the network of UAVs and the control domain. Currently, coverage control, the control of UAVs to cover a given region, is an important problem in the study of multi-UAV networks. In this paper, an existing coverage control algorithm [17] has been significantly improved by maximising the sensing field of view (SFOV) over the area of interest, making it much more efficient. The camera used in each UAV allows pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) in the bottom hemisphere of the UAV. We propose two network coverage algorithms for multiple UAVs to make this improvement: one is the Voronoi based coverage control, and the other one is the constrained optimization coverage algorithm. Finally, the proposed schemes are tested in simulation and a real outdoor environment.