Area Coverage Using Multiple Aerial Robots With Coverage Redundancy and Collision Avoidance

Abstract

This paper presents a coverage control strategy for a team of aerial robots equipped with downward facing cameras. Based on the observation that the resolution of a camera mounted on an aerial robot degrades with the altitude of the robot, we propose a decentralized gradient-based controller that allows each robot to trade off between the size of the area it monitors and the quality of sensing it performs over the area. Moreover, the proposed controller drives a team of robots to a configuration that maximizes the joint probability for detecting targets or events of interest in the coverage domain. To ensure inter-robot collision avoidance during deployment, we utilize control barrier functions to prevent the robots from getting closer to each other than a specified safety distance. The proposed controller is experimentally validated in simulations.