Asynchronous Reliability-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning

Mickey H L Li, Arthur G Richards, Mahesh Sooriyabandara

Research output: Contribution to conferenceConference Paperpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Graceful degradation is a potential advantage of Multi-Robot Systems over Single-Robot Systems. In aerial robotics applications, such as infrastructure inspection, this trait is desirable as it would improve mission reliability despite the use of failure-prone low-cost drones. The Reliability-Aware Multi-Agent Coverage Path Planning (RA-MCPP) problem finds path plans for each robot to maximise the probability of mission completion by a given deadline. This paper proposes a path planner for RA-MCPP formulated in continuous time, enabling more complex realistic environments to be considered. The proposed method (i) extends a reliability evaluation framework to evaluate the Probability of Completion metric on asynchronous strategies on non-unit lattice graph environments, and (ii) introduces a greedy-genetic meta-heuristic optimisation method as a scalable and accurate RA-MCPP solver. This method is shown to provide plans with higher reliability when compared with existing approaches in three real inspection scenarios.
Original languageEnglish
Pages10023
Number of pages10029
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18 Oct 2021

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Asynchronous Reliability-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this