Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Path Planning for Area Monitoring

In this paper we are interested in area monitoring using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Basically, we propose a path planning approach for area monitoring where UAVs are considered as mobile collectors. The area to be monitored is divided into cells. The goal is to determine the path of each UAV such that each cell is covered by exactly one UAV, fairness is ensured in terms of the number of cells visited by each UAV and the path of each UAV is minimized. To meet our goal, we proceed in two steps. In the first step, we assign to each UAV the cells to visit. In the second step, we optimize the path of each UAV visiting its cells. For the first step, we propose two solutions. The first solution is based on cluster formation, each cluster is made up of the set of cells monitored by a same UAV. The second solution is based on game theory and uses coalition formation to determine the cells to be monitored by each UAV. In the second step and for both solutions, we propose to apply optimization techniques to minimize the path of each UAV that visits all its cells.