Autonomous Coverage with UAV Swarms using Optimal Task Assignment
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17979/ja-cea.2025.46.12090Keywords:
Multi-agent systems, Coordination of multiple vehicle systems, Task allocation-sharing and job design, Aerial robotics, Autonomous vehiclesAbstract
This work presents a cooperative perception-planning-navigation system that enables swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously cover a set of target positions represented by visual markers. The perception system fuses distributed observations to more accurately estimate the location of each task, while the planner solves a linear programming problem to obtain the optimal UAV-task assignment. Finally, a multi-vehicle off-board control module generates the trajectories and executes the arming, takeoff, tracking, and landing operations. Experimental validation was carried out in a Software-In-The-Loop (SITL) simulation using PX4 and Gazebo. The results confirm that UAV cooperation significantly improves the efficiency and robustness of aerial coverage missions.
References
A. Caballero, R. Tapia, y A. Ollero, «Combining route planning and visual servoing for offshore wind-turbine inspection using uavs», en Iberian Robotics Conference, 2024, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/ROBOT61475.2024.10796917.
M. Chen, H. Wang, C.-Y. Chang, y X. Wei, «SIDR: a swarm intelligence-based damage-resilient mechanism for UAV swarm networks», IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 77089-77105, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2989614.
U. Choi y S. Lee, «Bandwidth-aware coverage path planning for swarm of uavs with aerial base station», en International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 2023, pp. 360-365. doi: 10.1109/ICUAS57906.2023.10156244.
S.-J. Chung, A. A. Paranjape, P. Dames, S. Shen, y V. Kumar, «A survey on aerial swarm robotics», IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 34, n.º 4, pp. 837-855, 2018, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2018.2857475.
F. J. Gañán, J. A. Sanchez-Diaz, R. Tapia, J. R. Martínez-de Dios, y A. Ollero, «Efficient event-based intrusion monitoring using probabilistic distributions», en IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, 2022, pp. 211-216. doi: 10.1109/SSRR56537.2022.10018655.
S. Garrido-Jurado, R. Muñoz-Salinas, F. J. Madrid-Cuevas, y M. J. Marín-Jiménez, «Automatic generation and detection of highly reliable fiducial markers under occlusion», Pattern Recognition, vol. 47, n.º 6, pp. 2280-2292, jun. 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.patcog.2014.01.005.
K. Hou, Y. Yang, X. Yang, y J. Lai, «Cooperative control and communication of intelligent swarms: a survey», Control Theory and Technology, vol. 18, n.º 2, pp. 114-134, 2020, doi: 10.1007/s11768-020-9195-1.
S. Javed et al., «State-of-the-art and future research challenges in UAV swarms», IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 11, n.º 11, pp. 19023-19045, 2024, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2024.3364230.
H. W. Kuhn, «The hungarian method for the assignment problem», Naval Research Logistics Quarterly, vol. 2, n.º 1-2, pp. 83-97, 1955, doi: 10.1002/nav.3800020109.
G. Laporte, 2007. What you should know about the vehicle routing problem. Naval Research Logistics 54 (8), 811–819. DOI: 10.1002/nav.20261
V. Lepetit, F. Moreno-Noguer, y P. Fua, «EPnP: An accurate O(n) solution to the PnP problem», Int J Comput Vis, vol. 81, n.º 2, pp. 155-166, feb. 2009, doi: 10.1007/s11263-008-0152-6.
J. R. Martínez-de Dios, A. Gómez Eguíluz, J. P. Rodríguez-Gómez, R. Tapia, y A. Ollero, «Towards UAS surveillance using event cameras», en IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2020, pp. 71-76. doi: 10.1109/SSRR50563.2020.9292606.
J. Munkres, «Algorithms for the assignment and transportation problems», Journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, vol. 5, n.º 1, pp. 32-38, 1957, doi: 10.1137/0105003.
R. Tapia, M. Gil-Castilla, J. R. Martínez-de Dios, y A. Ollero, «Autonomous guidance of an aerial robot using 6-DoF visual control and behavior trees», en Iberian Robotics Conference, nov. 2024, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/ROBOT61475.2024.10797354.
R. Tapia, J. R. Martínez-de Dios, y A. Ollero, «Efficient mosaicking for linear infrastructure inspection using aerial robots», en Jornadas de Automática, 2019. doi: 10.17979/spudc.9788497497169.802.
Y. Zhou, B. Rao, y W. Wang, «UAV swarm intelligence: Recent advances and future trends», IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 183856-183878, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3028865.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Manuel Domínguez-Montero, Víctor Rivera, Raul Tapia, José Ramiro Martínez-de Dios, Anibal Ollero
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
