ドローンがドローンを導く：障害物環境における低装備マイクロ航空機の協調ナビゲーション
Drones Guiding Drones: Cooperative Navigation of a Less-Equipped Micro Aerial Vehicle in Cluttered Environments
高性能な親ドローンが環境地図を作成し、軽量な子ドローンをLiDARで追跡しながら衝突回避経路を案内することで、GNSSの使えない障害物環境でも小型機を自律飛行させる協調ナビゲーション手法を実機検証した。
著者: Václav Pritzl, Matouš Vrba, Yurii Stasinchuk, Vít Krátký, Jiří Horyna, Petr Štěpán, Martin Saska
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Reliable deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cluttered unknown environments requires accurate sensors for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied localization and obstacle avoidance. Such a requirement limits the usage of cheap and micro-scale vehicles with constrained payload capacity if industrial-grade reliability and precision are required. This paper investigates the possibility of offloading the necessity to carry heavy sensors to another member of the UAV team while preserving the desired capability of the smaller robot intended for exploring narrow passages. A novel cooperative guidance framework offloading the sensing requirements from a minimalistic secondary UAV to a superior primary UAV is proposed. The primary UAV constructs a dense occupancy map of the environment and plans collision-free paths for both UAVs to ensure reaching the desired secondary UAV's goals even in areas not accessible by the bigger robot. The primary UAV guides the secondary UAV to follow the planned path while tracking the UAV using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based relative localization. The proposed approach was verified in real-world experiments with a heterogeneous team of a 3D LiDAR-equipped primary UAV and a micro-scale camera-equipped secondary UAV moving autonomously through unknown cluttered GNSS-denied environments with the proposed framework running fully on board the UAVs.
