(IROS) Navigation-Assitant Path Planning within a MAV team

Abstract: In micro aerial vehicle (MAV) operations, the success of a mission is highly dependent on navigation performance, which has raised recent interests on navigation-aware path planning. One of the challenges lies in that optimal motions for successful navigation and the designated mission are often different in unknown, unstructured environments, and only sub-optimality may be obtained in each aspect. We aim to organize a two-MAV team that can effectively execute the mission and simultaneously guarantee navigation quality, which consists of a main-agent responsible for mission and a sub-agent for navigation of the team. Especially, this paper focuses on path planning of the sub-agent to provide navigational assistance to the main-agent using a monocular camera. We adopt a graph-based receding horizon planner to find a dynamically feasible path in order for the sub-agent to help the main-agent’s navigation. In this process, we present a metric for evaluating the localization performance utilizing the distribution of the features projected to the image plane. We also design a map management strategy and pose-estimation support mechanism in a monocular camera setup, and validate their effectiveness in two scenarios.

Bibtex

@INPROCEEDINGS{9340792,
  author={Jang, Youngseok and Lee, Yunwoo and Kim, H. Jin},
  booktitle={2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, 
  title={Navigation-Assistant Path Planning within a MAV team}, 
  year={2020},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1436-1443},
  keywords={Measurement;Location awareness;Simultaneous localization and mapping;Navigation;Cameras;Path planning;Intelligent robots},
  doi={10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9340792}}