In recent years, teams of robot and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been commissioned by researchers to enable accurate, online wildfire coverage and tracking. While the majority of prior work focuses on the coordination and control of such multi-robot systems, to date, these UAV teams have not been given the ability to reason about a fire's track (i.e., location and propagation dynamics) to provide performance guarantee over a time horizon. Motivated by the problem of aerial wildfire monitoring, we propose a predictive framework which enables cooperation in multi-UAV teams towards collaborative field coverage and fire tracking with probabilistic performance guarantee. Our approach enables UAVs to infer the latent fire propagation dynamics for time-extended coordination in safety-critical conditions. We derive a set of novel, analytical temporal, and tracking-error bounds to enable the UAV-team to distribute their limited resources and cover the entire fire area according to the case-specific estimated states and provide a probabilistic performance guarantee. Our results are not limited to the aerial wildfire monitoring case-study and are generally applicable to problems, such as search-and-rescue, target tracking and border patrol. We evaluate our approach in simulation and provide demonstrations of the proposed framework on a physical multi-robot testbed to account for real robot dynamics and restrictions. Our quantitative evaluations validate the performance of our method accumulating 7.5x and 9.0x smaller tracking-error than state-of-the-art model-based and reinforcement learning benchmarks, respectively.
翻译:近年来,研究人员委托机器人和无人驾驶航空飞行器(无人驾驶飞行器)小组(无人驾驶飞行器)进行精确、在线野火覆盖和跟踪,使在线野火覆盖和跟踪工作得以准确、在线、野火覆盖和跟踪; 虽然以往大部分工作的重点是协调和控制这些多机器人系统,但迄今为止,无人驾驶飞行器小组尚未被赋予能力,无法对火灾轨迹(即位置和传播动态)进行解释,以在一定的时间范围内提供履约保障; 受空中野火监测问题的驱使,我们提议了一个预测框架,使多无人驾驶飞行器小组能够开展合作,以协作性实地覆盖和火灾跟踪,同时提供概率性能保障; 我们的方法使无人驾驶飞行器能够推断潜在的火灾传播动态动态,以便在安全危急条件下进行长期协调; 我们制定一套新颖的、分析性的时间和跟踪框架,以使无人驾驶飞行器能够根据具体案例的估算状态分配其有限的资源,覆盖整个火灾区,并提供概率性能保证。 我们的成果不限于空中野火监测案例和稳定性跟踪,而且我们提出的对真实性勘测标的系统(例如搜索和模拟的边界勘测)的系统,可以分别进行搜索和测试。