Distributed Control for 3D Inspection using Multi-UAV Systems
Angelos Zacharia, Savvas Papaioannou, Panayiotis Kolios, Christos Panayiotou
TL;DR
The paper addresses collaborative 3D inspection of an object using a team of identical quadrotor UAVs within a bounded region. It proposes an online distributed control framework that minimizes an inspection cost $\mathcal{H}$ by driving UAVs toward the centroids of their Voronoi regions and by projecting target points to guide sensing, while maintaining collision avoidance via a repulsive term and a PD-based motion planner; the control law combines $\boldsymbol{u}_{c,i}$ and $\boldsymbol{u}_{o,i}$ to guarantee stability with a Lyapunov function $\Upsilon$. Key contributions include Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation-based positioning, Gaussian density-guided inspection of projected targets, and a scalable distributed controller with local communication. Evaluation via simulations with 5 UAVs shows collision-free trajectories and successful inspection of 132 surface points within about 25.4 s, illustrating practical impact for rapid, safe 3D inspection in complex environments.
Abstract
Cooperative control of multi-UAV systems has attracted substantial research attention due to its significance in various application sectors such as emergency response, search and rescue missions, and critical infrastructure inspection. This paper proposes a distributed control algorithm to generate collision-free trajectories that drive the multi-UAV system to completely inspect a set of 3D points on the surface of an object of interest. The objective of the UAVs is to cooperatively inspect the object of interest in the minimum amount of time. Extensive numerical simulations for a team of quadrotor UAVs inspecting a real 3D structure illustrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.