Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed in the target area to carry out detecting or monitoring tasks. Sweep coverage is an important concern of WSNs that more targets in the area can be monitored with fewer mobile sensor nodes. With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV has been increasingly used in military and civil fields. UAVs can be regarded as sensor nodes to perform specific tasks. Due to the limited battery lifetime of UAV in flight mission, it is difficult to achieve full coverage of all targets in a large-scale monitoring scenario. In this article, we study how to plan the paths of multiple UAVs for sweep coverage. Based on the background of forest fire early warning and monitoring, we consider a min-time max-coverage (MTMC) issue in sweep coverage, where a set of UAVs is dispatched to efficiently patrol the targets in the given area to achieve maximum coverage in minimum time. We establish a mathematical model considering the different coverage quality requirements of the targets in the given area. Then, we analyze the characteristics of the model and propose a heuristic algorithm weighted targets sweep coverage (WTSC) to find the optimal path, which considers the weights of the targets and the performance constraints of UAVs. Finally, we provide various numerical experiments and comparisons with several previous works to validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

中文翻译：

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多无人机扫掠路径规划方法


无线传感器网络（WSN）通常部署在目标区域中以执行检测或监控任务。扫描覆盖范围是无线传感器网络的一个重要问题，因为可以用更少的移动传感器节点监控该区域中的更多目标。随着无人机技术的快速发展，无人机越来越多地应用于军事和民用领域。无人机可以被视为执行特定任务的传感器节点。由于无人机在飞行任务中电池寿命有限，在大范围监控场景下很难实现对所有目标的全覆盖。在本文中，我们研究如何规划多架无人机的路径以进行扫描覆盖。基于森林火灾预警监测的背景，我们在扫描覆盖中考虑最小时间最大覆盖（MTMC）问题，即派遣一组无人机对给定区域内的目标进行高效巡逻，以实现最大覆盖范围最短时间。我们建立了考虑给定区域内目标不同覆盖质量要求的数学模型。然后，我们分析了模型的特点，并提出了一种启发式算法加权目标扫描覆盖（WTSC）来寻找最佳路径，该算法考虑了目标的权重和无人机的性能约束。最后，我们提供了各种数值实验并与之前的一些工作进行比较，以验证所提出算法的优越性。