Multi-Robot Persistent Surveillance With Connectivity Constraints

Abstract

Mobile robots, especially unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are of increasing interest for surveillance and disaster response scenarios. We consider the problem of multi-robot persistent surveillance with connectivity constraints where robots have to visit sensing locations periodically and maintain a multihop connection to a base station. We formally define several problem instances closely related to multi-robot persistent surveillance with connectivity constraints, i.e., connectivity-constrained multirobot persistent surveillance (CMPS), connectivity-constrained multi-robot reachability (CMR), and connectivity-constrained multi-robot reachability with relay dropping (CMRD), and show that they are all NP-hard on general graph. We introduce three heuristics with different planning horizons for convex grid graphs and combine these with a tree traversal approach which can be applied to a partitioning of non-convex grid graphs (CMPS with tree traversal, CMPSTT). In simulation studies we show that a short horizon greedy approach, which requires parameters to be optimized beforehand, can outperform a full horizon approach, which requires a tour through all sensing locations, if the number of robots is larger than the minimum number of robots required to reach all sensing locations. The minimum number required is the number of robots necessary for building a chain to the farthest sensing location from the base station. Furthermore, we show that partitioning the area and applying the tree traversal approach can achieve a performance similar to the unpartitioned case up to a certain number of robots but requires less optimization time.

Multi-UAV Surveillance With Minimum Information Idleness and Latency Constraints

“…We present a novel cooperative data delivery approach where UAVs visit SLs and transport the captured data in a store-andforward fashion to the BS. This is different from our previous work on persistent multi-UAV/robot surveillance where permanent [25], [27] or intermittent [26] connectivity to the BS was considered. The paths for the UAVs are planned such that two UAVs meet at points that are within their communication range.…”

Multidrone Systems: More Than the Sum of the Parts

“…3 Offline coordination occurs before the mission begins, often casts the mission as an optimization problem with various constraints, and exploits advanced optimization or approximation techniques to find (near-)optimal solutions. 4 The computational effort for offline coordination is less critical, but it can leverage information about the mission only before it starts. For example, unexpected changes caused by the system dynamics or failures must be compensated for by online techniques during the mission.…”

“…For this reason, it makes sense to augment coordination with connectivity and plan the flight routes such that connectivity is maintained via relay drones to the ground station. 4 Since this routing problem is NP-hard, we apply cooperative planning heuristics that efficiently find routes with short overall coverage time.…”

Design of Distributed Reconfigurable Robotics Systems with ReconROS

“…ird, while programming distributed robotics applications with FPGA acceleration is greatly supported by R ROS, there is a demand for simulating such systems before deployment and for adding runtime monitoring functionality that can be used for debugging. Finally, we plan to showcase R ROS for multi-drones [15] which are one of the most demanding classes of distributed robotics systems.…”