Multi-robot persistent surveillance planning as a Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

We consider a persistent surveillance problem as one of finding sequences of visits to discrete sites in a periodic fashion, cast it as a Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, and solve it using exact methods developed in the operations research community. The work is a successful application of recent advances in combinatorial optimization for logistics problems but in the context of a robotics application taking place in continuous time. We apply these methods to the task of surveying a building using multiple UAVs and perform a long-term simulation developed to mimic a hardware testbed currently under development.