CONSOLE: intruder detection using a UAV swarm and security rings

This article introduces CONcentric Swarm mObiLity modEl (CONSOLE), a novel mobility model for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to efficiently achieve surveillance and intruder detection missions. It permits to protect a restricted area from intruders using a concentric circles model where simulated UAVs evolve in these so-called security rings. Having UAVs arranged in rings fosters an early detection (outer ring) while increases the reliability of the surveillance system featuring a last detection barrier (inner ring). Using the first return map from a chaotic attractor (an unpredictable sequence of real numbers) and a dynamic pheromone map, the UAV swarm members make a collective decision about their trajectories evaluating the options of a best-of- n problem. As a result, routes are unpredictable and detection rates are optimised. The parameters of each UAV, i.e. amount of pheromones and ring assignation, has been tuned using a specifically designed evolutionary algorithm. The performance of CONSOLE has been compared to five state-of-the-art mobility models on 20 case studies comprising 30 different scenarios each. Empirical results obtained via simulations demonstrate the better performance of CONSOLE in terms of amount of intruder detected and detection time.