Navigating UAVs for Optimal Monitoring of Groups of Moving Pedestrians or Vehicles

This paper focuses on navigating a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with cameras to monitor groups of ground pedestrians or vehicles that move along given paths with unkown, time-varying but bounded speeds. The objective is to deliver a high-quality surveillance of the pedestrians or vehicles. We formulate a surveillance problem which requires the UAVs to monitor the pedestrians or vehicles from as short as possible distances. We propose a navigation algorithm that enables each UAV to determine its movement locally with a minor participation of a central station. We prove that this algorithm is locally optimal. Simulations confirm its performance.