Human-Drone Swarm Interaction System for Persistent Monitoring of Large Disperse Area

This paper presents a human-drone swarm interaction system that enables adaptive and prioritized monitoring through an ergodic coverage control algorithm. The system is designed to ensure that drone swarms effectively cover a user-defined probability density function while maintaining both safety and persistent monitoring. A robust set of safety features prevents collisions between neighboring drones and prevents the drones from exiting the monitoring area. In addition, a fault tolerance algorithm is implemented to ensure continuous monitoring even if individual drones fail. The proposed algorithm is validated through real-world experiments using Crazyflie 2.1 from Bitcraze. The experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm successfully optimizes coverage as measured by the ergodic metric while maintaining safe operation.