Quadcopter Swarming

In extension of cities and technology there is always a need of surveillance to monitor for incidences of interest. Traditionally, the surveillance systems are stationary, and they are only able to cover limited areas. To achieve reliable monitoring via stationary sensors in a large area, it is necessary to deploy a huge number of them. Even in cases where the cost is not a major prohibitive factor, with the current technology, the communication bandwidth utilization certainly is a limiting factor. Therefore, to solve the coverage within the limits of the system, use of mobile sensors, which the infrastructure can move within the urban area is of interest (especially aerial sensors that have wide measurement zones). The aim is to compensate for the lack of full spatial coverage at all times by context-­aware temporal dynamic distribution of a set of mobile sensors. In one of the projects we pursue in the Kia Cooperative System’s Lab, we consider the problem of designing a dispatch policy for mobile agents that automatically orchestrates the topological distribution of the mobile sensors such that the `best' service for the global monitoring task is provided within the constraints of the network. Along with the theoretical development, we look to setup a state-­of-­the-­art experimental environment consisted of several quadcopters that demonstrate our algorithms with respect to an information background that is projected on the ground via a high-­resolution projector.