1 research outputs found
Visual Monitoring for Multiple Points of Interest on a 2.5D Terrain using a UAV with Limited Field-of-View Constraint
Varying terrain conditions and limited field-of-view restricts the visibility
of aerial robots while performing visual monitoring operations. In this paper,
we study the multi-point monitoring problem on a 2.5D terrain using an unmanned
aerial vehicle (UAV) with limited camera field-of-view. This problem is NP-Hard
and hence we develop a two phase strategy to compute an approximate tour for
the UAV. In the first phase, visibility regions on the flight plane are
determined for each point of interest. In the second phase, a tour for the UAV
to visit each visibility region is computed by casting the problem as an
instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem with Neighbourhoods (TSPN). We
design a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the TSPN instance.
Further, we reduce the TSPN instance to an instance of the Generalized
Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and devise an ILP formulation to solve it. We
present a comparative evaluation of solutions computed using a branch-and-cut
implementation and an off-the-shelf GTSP tool -- GLNS, while varying the points
of interest density, sampling resolution and camera field-of-view. We also show
results from preliminary field experiments