While using drones for remote surveillance missions, it is mandatory to do path planning of the vehicle since these are pilot-less vehicles. Path planning, whether offline or online, entails setting up the path as a sequence of locations in the 3D Euclidean space, whose coordinates happen to be latitude, longitude and altitude. For the specific application of remote surveillance of long linear infrastructures in non-urban terrain, the continuous 3D-ESP problem practically entails two important scalar costs. The first scalar cost is the distance traveled along the planned path. Since drones are battery operated, hence it is needed that the path length between fixed start and goal locations of a mission should be minimal at all costs. The other scalar cost is the cost of transmitting the acquired video during the mission of remote surveillance, via a camera mounted in the drone's belly. Because of the length of surveillance target which is long linear infrastructure, the amount of video generated is very high and cannot be generally stored in its entirety, on board. If the connectivity is poor along certain segments of a naive path, to boost video transmission rate, the transmission power of the signal is kept high, which in turn dissipates more battery energy. Hence a path is desired that simultaneously also betters what is known as communication cost. These two costs trade-off, and hence Pareto optimization is needed for this 3D bi-objective Euclidean shortest path problem. In this report, we study the mono-objective offline path planning problem, based on the distance cost, while posing the communication cost as an upper-bounded constraint. The bi-objective path planning solution is sketched out towards the end.
Optimizing UAV-UGV Coalition Operations: A Hybrid Clustering and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach for Path Planning in Obstructed Environment
University of Dhaka（达卡大学）；Green University of Bangladesh（孟加拉国绿色大学）；University of Maine at Presque Isle（缅因大学普雷斯克艾尔分校）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
Fully Onboard SLAM for Distributed Mapping with a Swarm of Nano-Drones
Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-ITET), ETH Zürich（信息科技与电气工程系（D-ITET），苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI), University of Bologna（电气、电子与信息工程系（DEI），博洛尼亚大学）
