Timely and Full Coverage Algorithm for Region Area with UAVs-assisted Small Satellite Constellation

Abstract

Recently, small satellites have been playing important roles in numerous military and civil applications, such as remote sensing and communication support, befitting from the coverage performance. However, restricted by the fixed orbits and on-board equipments, the long revisiting period and undesired blind stripe become the bottleneck for timely and full coverage, especially for the wide-range region area. Therefore, in this paper, the coverage-enhanced system comprising small satellites in constellation and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in formation is demonstrated. Based on the coverage system, the region decomposition and cooperative mechanism algorithm is designed to allocate coverage task to appropriate passing satellites and flying UAVs. Moreover, the design criterion for the satellite constellation in the UAV s-assisted system is proposed, achieving higher full-coverage ratio. The experimental results verify the enhancement of coverage performance for the proposed coverage system.