Visual area coverage with collaborative autonomous aerial vehicles
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Authors
Μπούσιας, Νικόλαος
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Abstract
The current thesis examines the problem of visual surveillance of a planar, convex region
of interest by a fully autonomous, heterogeneous swarm of mobile aerial vehicles, equipped
with Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras of conical field of view and operating under GPS-induced 3D
localization uncertainty. The proposed gradient-based collaborative control framework, serv-
ing as trajectory generator, utilizes a computationally less strenuous Voronoi-free tessellation
strategy to monotonically optimize the team’s collective visual coverage over the region of
interest, both in terms of total monitored area and the quality of the acquired information. The
designed distributed controllers of the flock consist of a multilevel structure, featuring inter-
agent cooperation and system-specific trajectory tracking, thus offering significant flexibility
regarding the physical implementation of the swarm. For the purposes of this thesis, a swarm
of quadrotors is assumed, the dynamics of which are examined and an optimal, dual level
(posture-orientation) controller for path following is designed. Multiple simulations where
conducted in order to evaluate the efficiency and robustness/resilience of the proposed scheme
in a variety of configurations. The required range of communications between the robots of
the system is examined and a multi-hop, deterministic communication algorithm is offered.
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Keywords
Autonomous swarms, Collaborative robotics, Area coverage, Decentralized control, Muti-agent systems, Sensor networks