Human-Drone Swarm Interaction System for Persistent Monitoring of Large Disperse Area

Abstract

This paper presents a human-drone swarm interactionsystem that enables adaptive and prioritized monitoringthrough an ergodic coverage control algorithm. The system isdesigned to ensure that drone swarms effectively cover a userdefinedprobability density function while maintaining bothsafety and persistent monitoring. A robust set of safety featuresprevents collisions between neighboring drones and prevents thedrones from exiting the monitoring area. In addition, a faulttolerance algorithm is implemented to ensure continuous monitoringeven if individual drones fail. The proposed algorithmis validated through real-world experiments using Crazyflie 2.1from Bitcraze. The experimental results demonstrate that thealgorithm successfully optimizes coverage as measured by theergodic metric while maintaining safe operation.