Drone path planning and dynamic arena-target allocation for crowd surveillance

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of surveillance of dynamic crowds in a bounded arena using multiple drones. The strategy proposes a prediction-based path planning approach for drones, where the target’s future position is predicted and used to generate a traverse path. The procedure for grouping numerous human beings in order to deal with a dense crowd scenario is also described. An algorithm to dynamically divide and allocate the arena to drones is also proposed to ensure equal workload distribution among all drones in the framework. The paper also discusses relevant concepts like detecting anomalous crowd activity and searching for any missing target in the arena. The proposed algorithms are validated on MATLAB environment numerically and ROS/Gazebo physics engine as a part of simulation-in-the-loop (SITL).