Collaborative Visual Area Coverage by Aerial Agents Under Positioning Uncertainty

Mariliza Tzes, Sotiris Papatheodorou, Anthony Tzes

Abstract: In this article a control scheme for the coverage of a convex region by a team of Mobile Aerial Agents (MAAs) is presented. Each MAA is outfitted with a downwards facing camera, the sensed area of which is dependent on the MAA's altitude. Additionally, the MAAs' footprints are assumed to be known with a certain degree of uncertainty. In order to take into account the MAAs' positioning uncertainty as well as their varying sensed areas, an Additively Weighted Guaranteed Voronoi (AWGV) partitioning of the region is utilized. Based on this partitioning scheme, a gradient-based algorithm is derived in order to guarantee monotonic increase of an area coverage metric, while also constraining the MAAs' altitudes and it is extended to offer collision avoidance. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulation studies.