Tracking Multiple Moving Assets with a Smaller Group of Drones

A limited number of drones must monitor a large number of assets whose future motions are unknown, ensuring that each asset is monitored by at least one drone. The ideal configuration places the drone’s sensors as close as possible to their assets. This objective is achieved by minimizing the altitude of all drones, which in turn reduces the total area of their ground coverage footprints. There exists an optimal assignment of assets to drones. However, if the assets are moving, then the optimal assignment is not static. Assets must instead be swapped between drones.We present centralized and decentralized methods to cluster our moving assets statically each control iteration, and then our cover algorithm guarantees continuous 100% coverage over our moving assets while minimizing the total area covered by drones.