Fig. 3: Particle swarm optimization for enhanced target visibility.
From: Drone swarm strategy for the detection and tracking of occluded targets in complex environments
a Swarm of 10 drones approaches target in default (linear) scanning pattern and b then converges d to maximize target visibility. b Our objective function O models target visibility by the contour size of the largest connected pixel cluster (blob) computed from anomalies in color (RGB) and thermal channels. d A maximum target visibility (MTV) of 72% was reached after 14 s by finding and converging above gaps in the vegetation, c, e as in the close-ups. For comparison, the blind sampling results from Fig. 2 are also d plotted for the same duration. Note that the white rays (solely used for visualization purposes) indicate direct line of sight between drones and target, the yellow boxes highlight the target, the white arrows show the movement of the drones between time steps t − 1 and t, the blue lines represent the total sampling paths of the swarm’s center of gravity, the yellow dots/drones indicate the best sampling position at time t, and the gray area shows the integrated ground coverage at time t. Simulation parameters (see Methods for details): drones' ground speed = 10 m/s, forest density = 300 trees/ha, n = 10, T = 16.3%, Δh = 1 m, h1 = 35 m, c1 = 1 m, c2 = 2 m, c3 = 2 m, s = c4 = 4.2 m, c5 = 0.3. See Supplementary Movie 2.
