An Area-Decomposition Based Approach for Cooperative Tasking and Coordination of UAVs in a Search and Coverage Mission

Abstract

This paper develops a low-computation area-decomposition based approach for tasking and planning for a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) involved in a search mission. For an area of interest captured as a convex polygon, a minimum bounding rectangle is calculated and decomposed into several partitions, which are assigned to different UAVs based on their flying and sensing capabilities. A novel Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based technique is developed to automatically task the UAVs to sweep the area of interest. If each individual UAV follows the created sweeping pattern and visit the generated waypoints, applying the developed method, it can be guaranteed that the entire area of interest is searched. The developed algorithm is applied to tasking and coordination of multiple UAVs searching an area on a farm and the implementation details and results are provided.