Angle-Aware Coverage with Camera Rotational Motion Control

This paper presents a novel control strategy for drone networks to improve the quality of 3D structures reconstructed from aerial images by drones. Unlike the existing coverage control strategies for this purpose, our proposed approach simultaneously controls both the camera orientation and drone translational motion, enabling more comprehensive perspectives and enhancing the map's overall quality. Subsequently, we present a novel problem formulation, including a new performance function to evaluate the drone positions and camera orientations. We then design a QP-based controller with a control barrier-like function for a constraint on the decay rate of the objective function. The present problem formulation poses a new challenge, requiring significantly greater computational efforts than the case involving only translational motion control. We approach this issue technologically, namely by introducing JAX, utilizing just-in-time (JIT) compilation and Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. We finally conduct extensive verifications through simulation in ROS (Robot Operating System) and show the real-time feasibility of the controller and the superiority of the present controller to the conventional method.

3D Map Reconstruction of an Orchard using an Angle-Aware Covering Control Strategy

In the last years, unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming a reality in the context of precision agriculture, mainly for monitoring, patrolling and remote sensing tasks, but also for 3D map reconstruction. In this paper, we present an innovative approach where a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles is exploited to perform remote sensing tasks over an apple orchard for reconstructing a 3D map of the field, formulating the covering control problem to combine the position of a monitoring target and the viewing angle. Moreover, the objective function of the controller is defined by an importance index, which has been computed from a multi-spectral map of the field, obtained by a preliminary flight, using a semantic interpretation scheme based on a convolutional neural network. This objective function is then updated according to the history of the past coverage states, thus allowing the drones to take situation-adaptive actions. The effectiveness of the proposed covering control strategy has been validated through simulations on a Robot Operating System.