Joint Coverage, Connectivity, and Charging Strategies for Distributed UAV Networks

• Published in: IEEE transactions on robotics Vol. 34; no. 4; pp. 883 - 900
• Main Authors: Trotta, Angelo, Di Felice, Marco, Montori, Federico, Chowdhury, Kaushik R., Bononi, Luciano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aerial robotics; Batteries; battery recharge scheduling; Charging; Charging stations; force control; Game theory; Ground stations; Legged locomotion; Military technology; networked robots; Optimization; Protocols; Replenishment; Robot sensing systems; Scheduling; sensor networks; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 1552-3098; 1941-0468
• DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2018.2839087

This paper proposes deployment strategies for consumer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maximize the stationary coverage of a target area and to guarantee the continuity of the service through energy replenishment operations at ground charging stations. The three main contributions of our work are as follows. 1) A centralized optimal solution is proposed for the joint problem of UAV positioning for a target coverage ratio and scheduling the charging operations of the UAVs that involves travel to the ground station. 2) A distributed game-theory-based scheduling strategy is proposed using normal-form games with rigorous analysis on performance bounds. Furthermore, a bio-inspired scheme using attractive/repulsive spring actions are used for distributed positioning of the UAVs. 3) The cost-benefit tradeoffs of different levels of cooperation among the UAVs for the distributed charging operations is analyzed. This paper demonstrates that the distributed deployment using only 1-hop messaging achieves approximation of the centrally computed optimum, in terms of coverage and lifetime.