Unified Robust Path Planning and Optimal Trajectory Generation for Efficient 3D Area Coverage of Quadrotor UAVs

Abstract

Area coverage is an important problem in robotics applications, which has been widely used in search and rescue, offshore industrial inspection, and smart agriculture. This paper demonstrates a novel unified robust path planning, optimal trajectory generation, and control architecture for a quadrotor coverage mission. To achieve safe navigation in uncertain working environments containing obstacles, the proposed algorithm applies a modified probabilistic roadmap to generating a connected search graph considering the risk of collision with the obstacles. Furthermore, a recursive node and link generation scheme determines a more efficient search graph without extra complexity to reduce the computational burden during the planning procedure. An optimal three-dimensional trajectory generation is then suggested to connect the optimal discrete path generated by the planning algorithm, and the robust control policy is designed based on the cascade N LH∞ framework. The integrated framework is capable of compensating for the effects of uncertainties and disturbances while accomplishing the area coverage mission. The feasibility, robustness and performance of the proposed framework are evaluated through Monte Carlo simulations, PX4 Software-In-the-Loop test facility, and realworld experiments.

Distributed Collision-Free Bearing Coordination of Multi-UAV Systems With Actuator Faults and Time Delays

“…Multi-UAV networks refer to systems composed of a group of networked drones that collaborate and communicate with each other to accomplish various tasks. Each UAV operates as an autonomous agent, capable of making decisions and taking actions based on its onboard sensors, communication capabilities, and assigned tasks, which have the potential to revolutionize a wide range of applications, such as surveillance [1], area coverage [2], search and rescue [3], etc. Compared with single drone, multi-UAV networks can be deployed to cover a larger area with high efficiency.…”