Autonomous tracking of suspicious unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by legitimate monitoring UAVs (or monitors) can be crucial to public safety and security. It is non-trivial to optimize the trajectory of a monitor while conceiving its monitoring intention, due to typically non-convex propulsion and thrust power functions. This article presents a novel framework to jointly optimize the propulsion and thrust powers, as well as the 3D trajectory of a solar-powered monitor which conducts covert, video-based, UAV-on-UAV tracking and surveillance. A multi-objective problem is formulated to minimize the energy consumption of the monitor and maximize a weighted sum of distance keeping and altitude changing, which measures the disguising of the monitor. Based on the practical power models of the UAV propulsion, thrust and hovering, and the model of the harvested solar power, the problem is non-convex and intangible for existing solvers. We convexify the propulsion power by variable substitution, and linearize the solar power. With successive convex approximation, the resultant problem is then transformed with tightened constraints and efficiently solved by the proximal difference-of-convex algorithm with extrapolation in polynomial time. The proposed scheme can be also applied online. Extensive simulations corroborate the merits of the scheme, as compared to baseline schemes with partial or no disguising.

中文翻译：

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用于隐蔽无人机对无人机视频跟踪和监视的轨迹、推进力和推力的联合优化


通过合法的监控无人机（或监视器）对可疑无人机（UAV）进行自主跟踪对于公共安全至关重要。由于典型的非凸推进和推力函数，在构思监控意图的同时优化监控器的轨迹并非易事。本文提出了一种新颖的框架，可联合优化推进力和推力，以及太阳能监控器的 3D 轨迹，该监控器可进行隐蔽的、基于视频的无人机对无人机跟踪和监视。制定了一个多目标问题，以最小化监视器的能量消耗并最大化距离保持和高度变化的加权和，这测量了监视器的伪装。基于无人机推进、推力和悬停的实际功率模型以及收集的太阳能模型，该问题对于现有求解器来说是非凸且无形的。我们通过变量替换来凸化推进功率，并对太阳能进行线性化。通过逐次凸逼近，然后用更严格的约束对所得问题进行变换，并通过多项式时间内的外推法通过近端凸差算法有效地求解。所提出的方案也可以在线应用。与部分或无伪装的基线方案相比，广泛的模拟证实了该方案的优点。