Visual Area Coverage by Heterogeneous Aerial Agents under Imprecise Localization

A control scheme for the coverage of a convex region by a team of mobile aerial agents (MAAs) under positioning uncertainty is presented in this letter. Each MAA is outfitted with a downwards facing camera, the field of view of which differs among agents, resulting in a sensed area which depends on the MAA's altitude and the view angle of its camera. Additionally, the MAAs' projections on the ground and altitudes are assumed to be known with varying uncertainty. In order to take into account the MAAs' positioning uncertainty as well as their varying sensed areas, an additively weighted guaranteed Voronoi partitioning of the region is utilized. Based on this partitioning scheme, a gradient-based algorithm is derived in order to guarantee monotonic increase of an area coverage metric, despite the positioning uncertainty, while also constraining the MAAs' altitudes. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulation studies.