Weighted Monitoring Interval Minimization for Disaster Surveillance with a UAV
Wenzheng Xu, Yunrui Cao, Dandan Huang, Weifa Liang, Jianwei Zhang, Tang Liu, Jian Peng, Xiaohua Jia, Zichuan Xu · 2025
UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are promising tools for disaster monitoring, by obtaining valuable information of important PoIs (Points of Interest) with onboard cameras. Since people trapped at some PoIs are more likely in danger than people in other PoIs, different PoIs have different monitoring priorities, so that the PoIs with high monitoring priorities should be visited more often than those with low priorities. Unlike existing studies that assumed a UAV is required to fly to the location of a PoI to monitor the PoI, we observe that the a UAV can monitor a PoI as long as it hovers at any location around the PoI (e.g., 200 m away horizontally), thereby reducing the flying time of the UAV. In this paper, we first study a problem of finding a sequence of monitoring tours for an energy-constrained UAV to monitor PoIs in a disaster area for a monitoring period T (e.g., 72 hours) persistently, such that the maximum weighted monitoring interval of PoIs is minimized, where the weight associated with a PoI is its monitoring priority, and the monitoring interval of a PoI is the longest time between its two consecutive visits in period T. We then propose a novel approximation algorithm for the problem. We finally evaluate the algorithm performance based on both a real testbed and the simulation. The experimental results show that the maximum weighted monitoring interval by the proposed algorithm is up to 30% shorter than those by existing algorithms.