A Method for UAV Reconnaissance and Surveillance in Complex Environments

In this paper, we study the reconnaissance and surveillance problem for drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which requires drones to fully cover the area of interest along their trajectories. We present a two-phase strategy to solve this UAV reconnaissance problem with a given altitude. Firstly, an easily implementable estimation algorithm is developed at a given altitude, and the minimum number and locations of cameras are determined to provide the completely coverage of the target area. The second phase addresses the distribution of the achieved locations over one or more UAVs and creates the paths to reconnoiter the corresponding area of interest. To achieve this, regular triangular patterns and the clustered spiral-alternating method are implemented, respectively. The reported results support the feasibility of the proposed solution.