Collaborative Coverage Strategy for Multiple UAVs Considering Coverage Utility

To complete the monitoring and searching task of large amphibious areas, multiple Unmanned Amphibious Vehicles (UAVs) have been introduced to solve the coverage problem of such areas. However, few studies were conducted on the coverage problem in amphibious environments, which is particularly challenging and urgent. In this case, we propose a collaborative coverage strategy to achieve amphibious regional coverage. Our approach is based on the following parts. Firstly, a centralized area allocation strategy is used to allocate subregion coverage tasks to each agent. Secondly, a distributed path planning algorithm is used to plan the coverage of each UAV in the amphibious environment to minimize the energy loss of the UAVs. This strategy incorporates the importance of the region and the ability of the agent, which shows great adaptability to the amphibious environment. Finally, the proposed strategy is compared with several previous popular methods in the simulations to verify its effective performance.