Energy efficient mobile target tracking using flying drones

This paper focuses on the energy efficiency problem where camera equipped flying drones are able to detect and follow mobile events that happen on the ground. We give a mathematical formulation of the problem of minimizing the total energy consumption of a fleet of drones when coverage of all events is required. Due to the extremely high complexity of the binary optimization problem, the optimum solution cannot be obtained even for small instances. On the contrary, we present LAS, a localized solution for the aforementioned problem which takes into account the ability of the drones to fly at lower altitudes in order to conserve energy. We simulate LAS and we compare its performance to a centralized algorithm and to an approach that uses static drones to cover all the terrain. Our findings show that LAS performs similar to the centralized algorithm, while it outperforms the static approach by up to 150% in terms of consumed energy. Finally, the simulation results show that LAS is very sustainable in presence of communication errors. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.