Wide area surveillance of urban environments using multiple Mini-VTOL UAVs

In this paper, a system for the wide area surveillance of general urban environments using multiple Mini-VTOL UAVs is developed. Given the information of terrain and buildings in the target area, the problem of (robust) complete coverage of the urban environment is solved by a three-step approximation approach. Firstly, the target area and the observation area are discretized into two sets respectively. Secondly, the visibility between these two sets is checked. Finally, a set covering problem is solved based on the greedy approaches. Two case studies based on real-world data are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of our developed system.