Long-Term Area Coverage and Radio Relay Positioning Using Swarms of UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly useful for tasks that require the acquisition of data over large areas. Online coverage algorithms obviously pose a greater challenge to ensure efficient operations with multiple UAVs compared to offline ones. Optimal relay positioning is a widely explored problem in the telecommunication field, where it is used to place antennas in a given area to provide robust wireless connection. The chapter presents the experiments used to assess the performance of the simultaneous coverage and relay-positioning algorithm and the related architecture. It proposes a novel approach to improve the performance of a UAVs swarm tasked to cover a given area in difficult contexts such as natural disasters. Future developments will deal with further increasing the robustness of the proposed architecture by exploring in detail the best strategies to adopt when multiple UAVs are busy with secondary tasks or to avoid the chain to be interrupted