Development of a UAV-based persistent surveillance system

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a key component of various modern communication infrastructures (e.g., Internet of things, 5G/B5G). Indeed, UAVs can be easily deployed and provide various types of applications (e.g., video and wireless surveillance, sensing and data collection). To meet the performance requirements of these applications, UAVs should rely on cost-effective deployment and time-efficient control mechanisms. Providing these mechanisms for a swarm of UAVs while meeting the application requirements under different mission constraints (e.g., UAV endurance and payload capacities, the variety and the complexity of the environment) is a challenge that still needs to be tackled, alongside increasing the UAVs' autonomy, resourcefully planning the trajectories for the swarm of UAVs while considering the environmental dynamics and conditions (e.g., environmental forces) and the coordination of their activities. Therefore, this project aims to develop new technologies to support a UAV-based persistent surveillance system (UPSS) that enables a swarm of UAVs to perform complex surveillance missions in various environments while coping with multiple trade-offs (e.g., efficient monitoring and sensing, a maximum degree of UAVs' autonomy, low mission costs). Moreover, these technologies will allow harvesting energy from environmental forces to protract the flight time of a fleet of UAVs, coordinate the communications between UAVs (e.g., data forwarding), supervise their activities (e.g., surveillance, energy replenishment), and distribute tasks (e.g., video surveillance, sensing and actuating over geographical sub-areas). They will minimize the UAV infrastructure operational costs and increase the autonomy of a swarm of UAVs to support efficient and persistent surveillance system. They will stimulate the development of new business cases and innovative UAV-based surveillance applications and significantly impact on the Canadian aeronautical industry and its supplies.