Anisotropic coverage control for surveillance of 3D structures

This demonstration illustrates the execution of a distributed algorithm for the deployment of a team of Aerial Robotic Workers (ARWs) for coverage of a 3D structure. One physical ARW and two simulated ARWs are used in the demonstration.

The position and orientation of each ARW is represented as a colored circle and arrow.

The structure to cover is abstracted into a finite set of landmarks, and each landmark is represented as a colored arrow. The color of a landmark corresponds to the ARW which is currently responsible for covering that landmark. The direction of the arrow corresponds to the outward normal to the surface at the position of the landmark.

The control algorithm prescribes the motion of the ARWs and the distribution of the landmarks among the ARWs. In particular, an ARW is allowed to intermittently yield responsibility of some of its landmarks to a different ARW. The motion and the landmark transfers are programmed in such a way to gradually increment the coverage of the structure. The algorithm is based on a generalization of the concept of Voronoi tessellations.

The algorithm is implemented on a ROS architecture, where the controller for each ARW corresponds to a different ROS node. The pose of the physical ARW is measured in real time with a motion capture system.

In the demonstration, we can see that three clusters of landmarks emerge, and that the ARWs position themselves in front of the landmarks that they are responsible to cover, at a suitable distance.