The block-sharing strategy for area monitoring missions using a decentralized multi-UAV system

In monitoring missions, using a cooperative team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the goal is to minimize the elapsed time between two consecutive observations of any point in the area. Techniques based in area partitioning achieve the goal when the sub-area assigned to each UAV is according to its capabilities. In previous work of the authors [1] it was presented the one-to-one strategy to obtain in a decentralized way a near optimal partition from any initial grid partition. In this paper a generalization of that strategy called the block-sharing technique is presented. The goal in this work is to accelerate the convergence to an optimal partition with respect to previous work.