A distributed framework for surveillance missions with aerial robots including dynamic assignment of the detected intruders

A dynamic and decentralized assignment algorithm based on one-to-one coordination is proposed to solve the multi-target allocation problem under communication constraints. The objective is to assign the intruders dynamically among the available aerial robots in order to keep as many intruders as possible under tracking. When an aerial robot is not tracking a target, it is patrolling the area in order to detect new intruders. The proposed distributed method has been implemented and tested both in simulation and in an indoor testbed with quadrotors in order to validate its interest in dynamic scenarios with multiple intruders and multiple aerial robots. Comparisons with centralized assignment methods are provided to show the algorithm performance.