This paper presents a distributed approach to provide persistent coverage of an arbitrarily shaped area using heterogeneous coverage of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and to recover from simultaneous failures of multiple UAVs. The proposed approach discusses level-homogeneous deployment and maintenance of a homogeneous fleet of fixed-wing UAVs given the boundary information and the minimum loitering radius. The UAVs are deployed at different altitude levels to provide heterogeneous coverage and sensing. We use an efficient square packing method to deploy the UAVs, given the minimum loiter radius and the area boundary. The UAVs loiter over the circles inscribed over these packing squares in a synchronized motion to fulfill the full coverage objective. An top-down hierarchy of the square packing, where each outer square (super-square) is partitioned into four equal-sized inner squares (sub-square), is exploited to introduce resilience in the deployed UAV-network. For a failed sub-square UAV, a replacement neighbor is chosen considering the effective coverage and deployed to the corresponding super-square at a higher altitude to recover full coverage, trading-off with the quality of coverage of the sub-area. This is a distributed approach as all the decision making is done within close range of the loss region, and it can be scaled and adapted to various large scale area and UAV configurations. Simulation results have been presented to illustrate and verify the applicability of the approach.

中文翻译：

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用于区域弹性覆盖的异构固定翼飞行器

本文提出了一种分布式方法，可使用固定翼无人机 (UAV) 的异构覆盖提供任意形状区域的持续覆盖，并从多个 UAV 的同时故障中恢复。所提出的方法讨论了给定边界信息和最小徘徊半径的同质固定翼无人机机队的水平同质部署和维护。无人机部署在不同的高度水平以提供异构覆盖和感知。考虑到最小的徘徊半径和区域边界，我们使用有效的方形包装方法来部署无人机。无人机以同步运动在这些包装方块上的圆圈上盘旋，以实现全覆盖目标。方形包装的自上而下的层次结构，其中每个外部正方形（超正方形）被划分为四个相同大小的内部正方形（子正方形），用于在部署的无人机网络中引入弹性。对于出现故障的小方格无人机，考虑有效覆盖选择替代邻居，部署到相应的高空超方格恢复全覆盖，权衡小方区域的覆盖质量。这是一种分布式方法，因为所有决策都是在损失区域的近距离范围内完成的，并且可以扩展并适应各种大尺度区域和无人机配置。仿真结果已被提出来说明和验证该方法的适用性。对于出现故障的小方格无人机，考虑有效覆盖选择替代邻居，部署到相应的高空超方格恢复全覆盖，权衡小方区域的覆盖质量。这是一种分布式方法，因为所有决策都是在损失区域的近距离范围内完成的，并且可以扩展并适应各种大尺度区域和无人机配置。仿真结果已被提出来说明和验证该方法的适用性。对于出现故障的小方格无人机，考虑有效覆盖选择替代邻居，部署到相应的高空超方格恢复全覆盖，权衡小方区域的覆盖质量。这是一种分布式方法，因为所有决策都是在损失区域的近距离范围内完成的，并且可以扩展并适应各种大尺度区域和无人机配置。仿真结果已被提出来说明和验证该方法的适用性。这是一种分布式方法，因为所有决策都是在损失区域的近距离范围内完成的，并且可以扩展并适应各种大尺度区域和无人机配置。仿真结果已被提出来说明和验证该方法的适用性。这是一种分布式方法，因为所有决策都是在损失区域的近距离范围内完成的，并且可以扩展并适应各种大尺度区域和无人机配置。仿真结果已被提出来说明和验证该方法的适用性。