Distributed Balancing of AAVs for Uniform Surveillance Coverage

This paper addresses the problem of enabling a group of autonomous air vehicles to provide surveillance coverage for an area significantly larger than their communication radius. Our formulation spatially decomposes the overall surveillance mission into subtasks and we develop a distributed cooperative control algorithm that continuously reassigns AAVs to these subtasks based on only local information in order to achieve the most balanced distribution of AAVs possible within a finite time interval of known bound. Various applications are discussed and simulations are included to illustrate convergence dynamics as well as to measure practical performance as a function of problem parameters.