Aerial Surveillance System based on Cooperative Sentinel and Searchers

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on an aerial surveillance system composed of aircrafts such as sentinels and searchers. The mission of the sentinels and searchers is to patrol unidentified flying targets. For this purpose, we use single sentinel and multiple searchers. These aircrafts have different roles as follows: the sentinel is able to monitor broader area and detect incoming targets, and the searchers approach and identify the target detected by the sentinel. In our previous surveillance system, the sentinel was assumed to be fixed. In this system, the sentinel is also allowed to move according to the target. Therefore, in this paper, we optimize the cooperative surveillance behavior of the moving sentinel and searchers by designing reward functions of a value iteration method. Through simulation experiments, we show that the cooperative surveillance enables the searchers to identify incoming targets as many as possible.