Persistent Crowd Tracking Using Unmanned AerIal Vehicle Swarms: A Novel Framework for Energy and Mobility Management

Aerial surveillance systems are a cost-effective and on-demand solution for smart city monitoring. However, the deployment of a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for continuous video capture of mobile ground target (MGT) activities poses new research issues in terms of energy management, scenario coverage, and multidevice task coordination. In this article, we address these challenges by proposing Persistent Crowd Tracking Using UAVs (PERCEIVE), a novel framework for continuous video surveillance via UAVs that are periodically replenished through mobile charging stations (MCSs).