Distributed cooperative control of swarm UAVs for dynamic environment persistent coverage

In order to control the uncertainty of dynamic environment into a certain scope, it is necessary for swarm UAVs to continuously cover the environment so as to achieve some perception, watch and spy task. A distributed collaborative coverage method was proposed based on the kinematic constraints of UAV, doing without prior knowledge and advanced path planning. Each UAV made its coverage decision online only based on the information gotten from the real-time local sensing and the local communications, making the swarm UAVs have persistent coverage ability. The information needed to be exchanged was very little, and only position information needed to be exchanged within local inter-UAV communication, which made the algorithm simpler and more practical. The simulation results show that, the distributed collaborative coverage method can adapt swarm UAVs for persistent coverage to dynamic environment, the performance of the algorithm is stable, flexible and scalable.