UAV-based persistent full area coverage with dynamic priorities

This paper tackles the problem of performing persistent and complete coverage of a target space with a minimum number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are required to preferentially visit subareas of interest with higher frequency than the rest of the surveillance area within a predefined time threshold. A Minimum Spanning Tree based recursive algorithm is firstly proposed to estimate the upper bound of minimum number of UAVs for area coverage with visiting frequency constraints. Then an autonomous path planning strategy is proposed for persistent coverage, where a combinatorial priority function is designed as the goal assignment strategy and a modified Dijkstra algorithm is applied as the goal planning to obtain the optimum path. Finally, computer simulations have been conducted for the evaluation of the proposed solution, and the obtained results show that these algorithms can compute valid and sound solutions under different setups for the UAVs. •Propose a Minimum Spanning Tree based algorithm to get the minimum UAVs for coverage.•Construct a cost map with idle time and distances for goal assignment.•Propose an autonomous algorithm for persistent area coverage with dynamic priorities.