Multi-UAV Collaboration to Survey Tibetan Antelopes in Hoh Xil

A multi-UAV collaboration method significantly reduces survey time for Tibetan antelope populations, achieving over 6 square kilometers of coverage in about 2 hours—a feat that previously required over 4 days with human-piloted single drones. The approach encodes path planning as a satisfiability modulo theory problem using one-hot encoding, generating feasible paths iteratively and optimizing them based on UAV endurance and camera parameters. This method leverages a generic few-shot detector for accurate counting (over 97% accuracy) without specialized training, demonstrating its potential for efficient wildlife monitoring in dynamic environments like Qinghai Hoh Xil.

Huang, R., Zhou, H., Liu, T., & Sheng, H. (2022). Multi-UAV Collaboration to Survey Tibetan Antelopes in Hoh Xil. Drones, 6(8), 196. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones6080196