Autonomous Patrol and Invader Chasing with Multiple Quadcopters by Coverage Control in Complex Environments

This paper presents autonomous patrol by multiple quadcopters based on coverage control. We focus on the distributed density map in coverage control, quadcopters can patrol by changing this map. This map is changed by measurement of mounted sensor which is anisotropic range sensor. Besides, the quadcopter mounts an omnidirectional range sensor to detect around the environment. Control law combines their sensors by designing the evaluation function of each sensor and realizes patrolling and invader chasing while avoiding the collision with other quadcopters and obstacles. The control law ensures convergence to local minima, and target selection or depth-first search ensure avoidance of local minima based on information of each quadcopter. We perform numerical simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.