Reliability-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning Using Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

Multi-Agent Systems have the potential advantage of graceful degradation over Single-Agent systems. This is a desirable trait in applications that require area coverage with failure-prone UAVs. This paper uses methods informed by Reliability Engineering to study this formally by using a new stochastic framework which evaluates a strategy’s probability of task completion. Based on this analysis, an integer linear programming formulation of the problem is then shown to provide almost optimal strategies at a fraction of the computational cost of brute force methods.