Time-Sensitive Target Coverage Under Visibility Constraints with UAVs

Sweep coverage with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be used in various applications, such as disaster management, data collection, and regulated surveillance. However, in real-world scenarios, targets are often obscured by obstacles or other targets, resulting in a limited visible region. Furthermore, in some scenarios, such as surveillance and disaster management, UAVs have to cover the targets within a certain time since the information of targets is time-sensitive. In this paper, we address the Time-Sensitive Target Coverage Under Visibility Constraints with UAVs (TCVCU) problem, where the targets are time-sensitive and the visible region of each target is a series of line segments. We propose VLSS algorithm to determine the minimum number of required UAVs for the TCVCU problem. Experiment results show that the algorithm can reduce the required UAVs by about 15% compared to the existing algorithms.