Resilient Coverage by Teams of Quadrotor UAVs: Theory and Experiments

We address the problem of coverage of a given environment by a team of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with limited sensing capabilities. The objective is to develop a control strategy for spreading the UAVs across the environment for monitoring purposes. We do not assume the availability of a central controller for UAV coordination, and the UAVs cooperate by exchanging information via a communication network. By considering possible cyberattacks acting on the UAV network, we propose a resilient distributed control scheme such that the UAVs locally compute their position set points to achieve an overall coverage configuration despite the malicious behaviors of some attacked UAVs. By relying on the Voronoi diagram-based coverage technique, we first address possible attack scenarios that can deteriorate a covering mission. Then, we consider a generalized Voronoi diagram-based coverage scheme that shows resilience against cyberattack scenarios. We also design an adaptive control strategy ensuring the convergence of the UAVs to a desired coverage configuration, whereas the UAV parameters (inertial matrix, drag coefficient, and so on) are not known. Mathematical analysis, simulation, and real-world experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed distributed resilient control scheme.