$T$-Timespan Dynamic Coverage of Mobile Camera Network for Visual Inspection

摘要

Visual inspection by robotics and automation is widely applied in industry and daily life. Although dynamic coverage of mobile sensors has been developed for various tasks, existing methods are not suitable for visual inspection since sensing model is not taken into account. For this reason, this letter aims at investigating dynamic coverage of mobile camera network by fully analyzing and utilizing the sensing model of cameras. Moreover, we also consider the sustainability of the coverage by defining a new concept of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$</tex-math></inline-formula> -timespan dynamic coverage, which deems that the coverage is maintained for a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$</tex-math></inline-formula> timespan. A homeomorphic based visual distance is applied to describe the coverage performance of the camera with considering its anisotropic sensing property, and based on which the cost function representing the total coverage performance of the mobile camera network is constructed. The gradient based control algorithms are designed for mobile cameras with non-holonomic kinematics to maximize the cost function. The simulations are conducted to validate the proposed method for <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$</tex-math></inline-formula> -timespan dynamic coverage of mobile camera network, and the experiments show the application for visual inspection.