Monitoring the Dispersion of a Contaminant Cloud in an Urban Region by a Swarm of UAV Sensors

In this paper, we develop a mechanism to detect, model and track the shape of a contaminant cloud boundary using air borne sensor swarms. The cloud consists of a transparent gas of nuclear, biological or chemical contaminants and is spreading slowly in an urban environment. A group of UAVs, having the required sensors, are made to fly through the cloud to detect the boundary of the cloud. The shape of the cloud is modeled using splinegon. An observer is designed to track the movement of the cloud. The output of the observer is used in the path planning of the UAVs. The path planning is online, decentralized and considers obstacle avoidance and connectivity maintenance among the UAVs. Simulated experiments are carried out to test the proposed cloud tracking algorithm.