UAV Motion Planning and Control for Multi-Coverage of 3D Environments

Multi-coverage (MC) represents an important problem for various tasks of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For the multi-coverage of a given environment, all visible surfaces must be covered by simultaneously captured images from at least k different viewpoints where additional constraints on resolution, geometry and error may be imposed. In this paper we formulate the MC problem for robot missions and propose a model-predictive control structure to navigate a stereo-pair of UAVs in a leader-follower formation throughout the mission. Our simulation study demonstrates that the UAVs reach and maintain the formation with high spatial and temporal accuracy.