Dynamic zone assignment under priorities for perimeter surveillance missions with aerial robots

This paper addresses the cooperation of multiple aerial robots and fixed stations to monitor efficiently a perimeter divided in sub-paths with different priorities. It is not efficient to solve the problem following the elapsed time criterion and an urgency index is defined to normalize the elapsed time through the whole perimeter. The problem is defined as an allocation problem where the aerial robots have to be assigned to the sub-paths in such a way that the maximum urgency is minimized and the zones with higher priorities are more frequently monitored than others. Fixed nodes act as allocation managers sending and receiving information to and from the aerial robots for decision-making. Each aerial robot implements a distributed method to patrol its assigned sub-path in a cooperative manner jointly with the rest of aerial robots in the same sub-path following a path partitioning strategy. This paper proposes a new algorithm based on the coordination variables to perform the allocation process of the aerial robots among the sub-paths in a distributed manner. It is implemented and compared with a previous method based on one-to-one coordination.