A Cost-Effective Cooperative Exploration and Inspection Strategy for Heterogeneous Aerial System

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.01225
• Publication Date: 2024-03-02
• Authors: Xinhang Xu; Muqing Cao; Shenghai Yuan; Thien Hoang Nguyen; Thien‐Minh Nguyen; Lihua Xie

In this paper, we propose a cost-effective strategy for heterogeneous UAV swarm systems cooperative aerial inspection. Unlike previous inspection works, the proposed method does not rely on precise prior knowledge of environment and can complete full 3D surface coverage objects in any shape. work, agents are partitioned into teams, with each drone assign different task, including mapping, exploration, Task allocation is facilitated by assigning optimal volumes to team, following best-first rules. A voxel map-based representation used pathfinding, rule-based path-planning core approach. We achieved best performance all challenging experiments approach, surpassing benchmark methods similar tasks across multiple evaluation trials. The open source at https://github.com/ntu-aris/caric_baseline as baseline Cooperative Aerial Robots Inspection Challenge 62nd IEEE Conference Decision Control 2023.