Directional Monitoring of Multiple Moving Targets by Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have wide applications in many fields, e.g. multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) cooperatively tracking multiple targets. This paper studies the multiple UAVs cooperatively tracking multiple targets by vision surveillance system, where the images/videos of targets have direction requirements. One target is covered by a UAV if and only if its position is within the Field Of View (UAV) as well as the UAV is within a requested angle of the target's face direction. The objective is to maximize the total covered targets number by the UAVs, which can not be solved by existing models. A simple effective distributed, online cooperation algorithm for this problem is designed in this paper. The theoretical analysis shows our algorithm achieves constant factor to the optimal.