This paper presents a beehive-inspired multi-agent drone system for autonomous information collection to support the needs of first responders and emergency teams. The proposed system is designed to be simple, cost-efficient, yet robust and scalable at the same time. It includes several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be tasked with data collection, and a single control station that acts as a data accumulation and visualization unit. The system also provides a local communication access point for the UAVs to exchange information and coordinate the data collection routes. By avoiding peer-to-peer communication and using proactive collision avoidance and path-planning, the payload weight and per-drone costs can be significantly reduced; the whole concept can be implemented using inexpensive off-the-shelf components. Moreover, the proposed concept can be used with different sensors and types of UAVs. As such, it is suited for local-area operations, but also for large-scale information-gathering scenarios. The paper outlines the details of the system hardware and software design, and discusses experimental results for collecting image information with a set of 4 multirotor UAVs at a small experimental area. The obtained results validate the concept and demonstrate robustness and scalability of the system.
Multi-robot teams can play a crucial role in many applications such as exploration, or search and rescue operations. One of the most important problems within the multi-robot context is path planning. This has been shown to be particularly challenging, as the team of robots must deal with additional constraints, e.g. inter-robot collision avoidance, while searching in a much larger action space. Previous works have proposed solutions to this problem, but they present two major drawbacks: (i) algorithms suffer from a high computational complexity, or (ii) algorithms require a communication link between any two robots within the system. This paper presents a method to solve this problem, which is both computationally efficient and only requires local communication between neighboring agents. We formulate the multirobot path planning as a distributed constraint optimization problem. Specifically, in our approach the asynchronous distributed constraint optimization algorithm (Adopt) [15] is combined with sampling-based planners to obtain collision free paths, which allows us to take into account both kinematic and kinodynamic constraints of the individual robots. The paper analyzes the performance and scalability of the approach using simulations, and presents real experiments employing a team of several robots.
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