Visibility-Based Monitoring of a Path Using a Heterogeneous Robot Team

Abstract

We address the problem of visually monitoring a terrain path using ground and aerial robots. This is a coupled problem that involves computation of a guard set for the environment and route planning for a heterogeneous group of robots through the points in the guard set. A terrain path that needs to be monitored can be transformed to generate a 1.5D terrain and robot paths can be modeled as chain visible curves to the terrain to ensure visibility. To efficiently monitor this 1.5D terrain, we present two solutions - a dynamic programming approach that finds the optimal solution but is slower and a integer linear programming solution that is faster in practice and that can take more constraints into account. We perform extensive simulations and do a comparative analysis of the two solution techniques.