On Visual Area Coverage Using Micro Aerial Vehicles

Sammanfattning: The aim of this Licentiate is to advance the field of cooperative visual coverage path planners for multiple Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), while aiming for their real life adoption towards the tasks of aerial infrastructure inspection. The fields that will be addressed are focusing in: a) the collaborative perception of the environment, b) the collaborative visual inspection, and c) the optimization of the aerial missions based on the remaining flying battery, camera constraints, coverage constraints and other real life mission induced constraints.Towards this envisioned aim, this Licentiate will present the following main theoretical contributions: a) centralized and distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC) schemes for the cooperative motion control of MAVs focusing in the establishing of a formation control architecture to enable a dynamic visual sensor from monocular cameras towards a reconfigurable environmental perception, b) revisiting the Cooperative Coverage Path Planning (C-CPP) problem for the inspection of complex infrastructures, c) developing a holistic approach to the problems of 2-D area coverage with MAVs for polygon areas, while considering the camera footprint, and d) designing of a scheme to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the battery during a flight mission, a fact that directly effects the flying capabilities of the MAVs. The theoretical contributions of this thesis have been extensively evaluated in simulation and real life large scale field trials, a direction that adds another contribution of the suggested framework towards the massive insertion of the aerial platforms as aerial tools in the close future.In the first part of this Licentiate, the vision, motivation, open challenges, contributions, and future works are discussed, while in the second part the full articles connected to the presented contributions in this Licentiate are presented in the annex.