Geographic-Region Monitoring by Drones in Adversarial Environments

Abstract

We consider surveillance of a geographic region by a collaborative system of drones. The drones assist each other in identifying and managing activities of interest on the ground. We also consider an adversary who can create both genuine and fake activities on the ground. The objective of the adversary is to use fake activities to maximize the response time to genuine activities. We present two collaboration algorithms and analyze their response times, as well as the adversary’s efforts in terms of the number of fake activities required to achieve a certain response time.