Multi-UAV Surveillance With Minimum Information Idleness and Latency Constraints

We discuss surveillance with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that minimize information idleness (the lag between the start of the mission and the moment when the data captured at a sensing location arrives at the base station) and constrain latency (the lag between capturing data at a sensing location and its arrival at the base station). This is important in surveillance scenarios where sensing locations should not only be visited as soon as possible, but the captured data needs to reach the base station in due time, especially if the surveillance area is larger than the communication range. In our approach, multiple UAVs cooperatively transport the data in a store-and-forward fashion along minimum latency paths (MLPs) to guarantee data delivery within a predefined latency bound. Additionally, MLPs specify a lower bound for any latency minimization problem where multiple mobile agents transport data in a store-and-forward fashion. We introduce three variations of a heuristic employing MLPs and compare their performance with an uncooperative approach in a simulation study. The results show that cooperative data transport reduces the information idleness at the base station compared to the uncooperative approach where data is transported individually by the UAVs.