Rolling Horizon Coverage Control with Collaborative Autonomous Agents

A.2024.0146 1 Rolling Horizon Coverage Control with Collaborative Autonomous Agents Savvas Papaioannou, Panayiotis Kolios, Theocharis Theocharides, Christos G. Panayiotou and Marios M. Polycarpou Abstract This work proposes a coverage controller that enables an aerial team of distributed autonomous agents to collaboratively generate non-myopic coverage plans over a rolling finite horizon, aiming to cover specific points on the surface area of a 3D object of interest. The collaborative coverage problem, formulated, as a distributed model predictive control problem, optimizes the agents' motion and camera control inputs, while considering inter-agent constraints aiming at reducing work redundancy. The proposed coverage controller integrates constraints based on light-path propagation techniques to predict the parts of the object's surface that are visible with regard to the agents' future anticipated states. This work also demonstrates how complex, non-linear visibility assessment constraints can be converted into logical expressions that are embedded as binary constraints into a mixed-integer optimization framework. The proposed approach has been demonstrated through simulations and practical applications for inspecting buildings with unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs). I NTRODUCTION The interest in swarm systems such as systems utilizing multiple autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UA Vs) has skyrocketed over the last few decades. Rapid advancements in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence coupled with the decreasing costs of electronic components have fuelled a remarkable surge in interest towards the technologies and applications of swarming systems. This work addresses the challenge of coverage planning and control using multiple collaborative intelligent autonomous agents, specifically autonomous UA Vs. Coverage planning [1] is crucial in several application domains including search and rescue operations and critical infrastructure inspections. It is one of the essential functionalities that can notably enhance the autonomy of existing swarming systems enabling them to execute fully automated missions in the aforementioned scenarios. In coverage planning our objective is to design trajectories that allow a team of autonomous mobile agents to comprehensively cover a designated area or points of interest. Concurrently we aim to optimize a specific mission goal such as minimizing the mission's duration and energy consumption of the agents. This work introduces a coverage control framework that optimizes both the kinematic and camera control inputs of multiple UA V agents simultaneously.