Multi-UAV persistent surveillance with basic patrolling pattern in minimum revisit time

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are well-suited to a wide range of mission scenarios, such as search and rescue, border patrol, and military surveillance. The complex and distributed nature of these missions often requires teams of UAVs to work together. Despite the complexity of the environment and patrol procedures, thepersistent surveillance is a one of an important problem in aerial patrol which can be simplified with basic patterns. The main object is minimizing the maximum revisit time in specified path. In this article, the single and multi-agent aerial search and patrol patterns are described and revisit time equation is driven for known UAV with real model and several situations. The impact of changing speed and the number of agents on the efficiency of persistent surveillance has been evaluated and compared with another patrolling pattern. As results of this paper, the basic search methods are distributed to an arbitrary number of the agent in several patterns. The revisit time function as a dependent parameter can be calculated from agent’s number as an independent parameter also in fixed value of revisit time, the optimal number of UAVs can be obtained due to specified search area. The results show that in the high-speed situation, increase the number of UAVs in the particular area, little performance improvement occurs in minimizing of maximum revisit time. A velocity and UAV number domain can be determined whereas the maximum revisit time always is minimal.