Wide Area Surveillance Using Electric Vehicles and Limited-Flying-Time Helicopters

Abstract

Sensor networks can be useful for disaster recovery. It is essential how to realize time-efficient and pervasive surveillance over a wide disaster-affected area. A surveillance architecture based on collaboration among multiple electric helicopters and vehicles is presented. Area division principles are used considering cost minimization as well as considering the requirements of allowable surveillance time, and transmission range and effective bandwidth of the wireless link. A simple model and methodology for area division considering the battery-capacity-limited flying range are presented. Numerical examples show the feasibility of the area division approach. Finally, it is shown that the availability of an electric helicopter for continuous surveillance is significantly improved by using a few number of spare batteries maintained in the partner electric vehicle.

Keywords

• Disaster
• Surveillance
• Ad-hoc network
• Wireless
• UAV
• Helicopter
• Electric vehicle.