Online Informative Path Planning for Active Information Gathering of a 3D Surface

This paper presents an online informative path planning approach for active information gathering on three-dimensional surfaces using aerial robots. Most existing works on surface inspection focus on planning a path offline that can provide full coverage of the surface, which inherently assumes the surface information is uniformly distributed...

Multi-robot Task Assignment for Aerial Tracking with Viewpoint Constraints

We address the problem of assigning a team of drones to autonomously capture a set desired shots of a dynamic target in the presence of obstacles. We present a two-stage planning pipeline that generates offline an assignment of drone to shots and locally optimizes online the viewpoint. Given desired shot parameters, the high-level planner uses a...

With whom to communicate: Learning efficient communication for multi-robot collision avoidance

Decentralized multi-robot systems typically perform coordinated motion planning by constantly broadcasting their intentions as a means to cope with the lack of a central system coordinating the efforts of all robots. Especially in complex dynamic environments, the coordination boost allowed by communication is critical to avoid collisions...

Robust Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance for Micro Aerial Vehicles in Dynamic Environments

In this paper, we present an on-board vision-based approach for avoidance of moving obstacles in dynamic environments. Our approach relies on an efficient obstacle detection and tracking algorithm based on depth image pairs, which provides the estimated position, velocity and size of the obstacles. Robust collision avoidance is achieved by...

B-UAVC: Buffered Uncertainty-Aware Voronoi Cells for probabilistic multi-robot collision avoidance

This paper presents B-UAVC, a distributed collision avoidance method for multi-robot systems that accounts for uncertainties in robot localization. In particular, Buffered Uncertainty-Aware Voronoi Cells (B-UAVC) are employed to compute regions where the robots can safely navigate. By computing a set of chance constraints, which guarantee...

Distributed multi-robot formation splitting and merging in dynamic environments

This paper presents a distributed method for splitting and merging of multi-robot formations in dynamic environments with static and moving obstacles. Splitting and merging actions rely on distributed consensus and can be performed to avoid obstacles. Our method accounts for the limited communication range and visibility radius of the robots...