An Approach for the Determination of Drone Positions Set with Maximal Terrain Visibility

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been found in many practical applications, one of the challenging problems is the estimation of the optimal path of the UAV to cover the target area. The visual inspection and monitoring with UAVs is the example of such applications and they have been attracted increasing attention in recent years. In our paper we present a novel approach to approximately estimate a set of viewpoints to reach maximal visibility of the polygonal model of the terrain in linear time. The proposed approach is based on a subdivision of a terrain model on a regular grid and on using ray casting technique to solve a terrain cover problem.