Decentralized strategy to ensure information propagation in area monitoring missions with a team of UAVs under limited communications

This paper presents the decentralized strategy followed to ensure information propagation in area monitoring missions with a fleet of heterogeneous UAVs with limited communication range. The goal of the team is to detect pollution sources over a large area as soon as possible. Hence the elapsed time between two consecutive visits should be minimized. On the other hand, in order to exploit the capabilities derived from having a fleet of UAVs, an efficient area partition is performed in a distributed manner using a one-to-one coordination schema according to the limited communication ranges. Another requirement is to have the whole team informed about the location of the new pollution sources detected. This requirement is challenging because the communication range of the vehicles is small compared to the area covered in the mission. Sufficient and necessary conditions are provided to guarantee one-to-one UAV communication in grid-shape area partitions, allowing to share any new information among all the members of the team, even under strong communication constraints. The proposed decentralized strategy has been simulated to confirm that fulfils all the goals and requirements and has been also compared to other patrolling strategies.