Abstract
Monitoring roads is an important task for missions such as base security. This paper describes a road monitoring system composed of a team of small UAVs equipped with gimballed cameras. Given a fine description of the target road, algorithms for waypoint approximation, sensor steering, and UAV spacing are developed to allow N UAVs to survey stretches of road for activity. By automating the route generation and road tracking, human operators are freed to study the sensor returns from the vehicles to detect anomalous behavior. The spacing algorithm is robust to retasking and insertion/deletion of UAVs. Hardware results are presented that demonstrate the applicability of the solution.