Persistent monitoring with a team of autonomous gliders using static soaring
José J. Acevedo, Nicholas Lawrance, Begoña C. Arrue, Salah Sukkarieh, Anı́bal Ollero · 2014
Exploiting wind currents in the environment allows autonomous gliders to gain altitude and energy and consequently extend flight duration. This paper considers the problem of a persistent monitoring mission using multiple autonomous gliders and exploiting thermal soaring. Communications constraints and non-homogeneous teams of gliders are considered. A distributed method based on coordination variables is proposed to monitor the area in a cooperative manner by following a partitioning patrolling strategy. A distributed one-to-one coordination technique is used to manage the gliders' access to thermals according to their states and known thermal locations. Gliders perform a model-based estimation about their energy losses between thermals to estimate the optimal time to remain in a thermal to maintain persistent surveillance with minimum refresh time. Simulated test results are provided to evaluate how the proposed approach is able to extend the mission while maintaining near-optimal performance.