Rolling horizon coverage control with collaborative autonomous agents

This work proposes a coverage controller that enables an aerial team of distributed autonomous agents to collaboratively generate non-myopic coverage plans over a rolling finite horizon, aiming to cover specific points on the surface area of a three-dimensional object of interest. The collaborative coverage problem, formulated as a distributed model predictive control problem, optimizes the agents' motion and camera control inputs, while considering inter-agent constraints aiming at reducing work redundancy. The proposed coverage controller integrates constraints based on light-path propagation techniques to predict the parts of the object's surface that are visible with regard to the agents' future anticipated states. This work also demonstrates how complex, non-linear visibility assessment constraints can be converted into logical expressions that are embedded as binary constraints into a mixed-integer optimization framework. The proposed approach has been demonstrated through simulations and practical applications for inspecting buildings with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).This article is part of the theme issue 'The road forward with swarm systems'.