A hierarchical multi-UAV cooperative framework for infrastructure inspection and reconstruction  

作　　者：Chuanxiang Gao Xinyi Wang Xi Chen Ben M.Chen 

机构地区：[1]Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering,The Chinese University of Hong Kong,Hong Kong,Shatin,NT,China

出　　处：《Control Theory and Technology》2024年第3期394-405,共12页控制理论与技术（英文版）

基　　金：supported in part by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR(Nos.14209020,14206821);in part by the Hong Kong Region Centre for Logistics Robotics(HKCLR).

摘　　要：Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)are emerging as a powerful tool for inspections and repair works in large-scale and unstructured 3D infrastructures,but current approaches take a long time to cover the entire area.Planning using UAVs for inspections and repair works puts forward a requirement of improving time efficiency in large-scale and cluster environments.This paper presents a hierarchical multi-UAV cooperative framework for infrastructure inspection and reconstruction to balance the workload and reduce the overall task completion time.The proposed framework consists of two stages,the exploration stage and the exploitation stage,resolving the task in a sequential manner.At the exploration stage,the density map is developed to update global and local information for dynamic load-balanced area partition based on reconstructability and relative positions of UAVs,and the Voronoi-based planner is used to enable the UAVs to reach their best region.After obtaining the global map,viewpoints are generated and divided while taking into account the battery capacity of each UAV.Finally,a shortest path planning method is used to minimize the total traveling cost of these viewpoints for obtaining a high-quality reconstruction.Several experiments are conducted in both a simulated and real environment to show the time efficiency,robustness,and effectiveness of the proposed method.Furthermore,the whole system is implemented in real applications.

关 键 词：MULTI-UAV Coverage path planning Infrastructure inspection and reconstruction 

分 类 号：V279[航空宇航科学与技术—飞行器设计]