Collaborative visual area coverage

Abstract

This article examines the problem of visual area coverage by a network of Mobile Aerial Agents (MAAs). Each MAA is assumed to be equipped with a downwards facing camera with a conical field of view which covers all points within a circle on the ground. The diameter of that circle is proportional to the altitude of the MAA, whereas the quality of the covered area decreases with the altitude. A distributed control law that maximizes a joint coverage-quality criterion by adjusting the MAAs' spatial coordinates is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is evaluated through simulation studies.

Parametrized Hyperplane Arrangements for Control Design with Collision Avoidance Constraints

“…. For compactness, k was omitted in (19). Hence, we have a collection of hyperplanes in the lifted space H * = {H * i } ∈ R d+np with:…”

“…The arrangement A(H * ) is composed of cells A(σ * ). The parametrization (19) leads to a dependence of the domain of existence of each cell A(σ * ) w.r.t. the parameter p.…”

“…Consequently, the center c is a suitable choice as the parameter p in (19) or as one of its component. Noteworthy, in the context of the translation motion, c is the only time-varying characteristic of a zonotope.…”

Voronoi-Based Coverage Control of Pan/Tilt/Zoom Camera Networks

“…Finally, it also bears mentioning that most existing work on coverage control of mobile (e.g., flying) cameras [11]- [13] mainly concerns with optimal active camera placement and simplifies the directionality issues of camera sensors by assuming a certain (e.g., downward facing) camera orientation. More accurate and descriptive camera models are usually employed in the design of probabilistic coverage algorithms, based on joint detection probability [9], [14], [15] and Gaussian mixture models [16], [17].…”

“…Proof. The continuous differentability of the proposed coverage policies directly follows from the integral forms of Voronoi parameters in (13) and (18). The positive invariance of 0, π 2 for α i is guaranteed by construction, in (15) and 20, because we always have α Vi ∈ 0, π 2 .…”