| Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have successfully been used to monitor ground activity. However, using small drones for extended periods of time is not yet possible, thus limiting their implementation. For instance, small quadcopters that can be easily transported and deployed do not exceed forty minutes of flying time in most cases and are susceptible to unexpected failure such as damage from natural hazards. On the other hand, robust quadcopters capable of longer flying times have larger dimensions and weight that prohibit ease of deployment. As an alternative to a single robust drone, our goal is to enable a network of small drones to monitor ground activity with the goal of uninterrupted operation and fault tolerance by sharing information with one another including knowledge of targets detected. A demonstration of this concept will be made through wildfire monitoring in collaboration with the US Forest Service. The monitoring problem under consideration in this research is related to the well-known multiple traveling salesman problem and its variants, namely Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window and Multiple Depot Drone Routing Problem. However, the solution to these routing problems cannot be used as-is because they would consider drone tours that visit each cluster (region) only once, not periodically. Moreover, they do not consider fault tolerance. *This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2301707. |
