2D visual area coverage and path planning coupled with camera footprints

• Published in: Control engineering practice 2018-06, Vol.75, p.1-16
• Main Authors: Mansouri, Sina Sharif, Kanellakis, Christoforos, Georgoulas, George, Kominiak, Dariusz, Gustafsson, Thomas, Nikolakopoulos, George
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Area coverage; Camera footprint; Control Engineering; Path planning; Reglerteknik; UAVs; Visual inspection
• ISSN: 0967-0661; 1873-6939; 1873-6939
• DOI: 10.1016/j.conengprac.2018.03.011

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with visual sensors are widely used in area coverage missions. Guaranteeing full coverage coupled with camera footprint is one of the most challenging tasks, thus, in the presented novel approach a coverage path planner for the inspection of 2D areas is established, a 3 Degree of Freedom (DoF) camera movement is considered and the shortest path from the taking off to the landing station is generated, while covering the target area. The proposed scheme requires a priori information about the boundaries of the target area and generates the paths in an offline process. The efficacy and the overall performance of the proposed method has been experimentally evaluated in multiple indoor inspection experiments with convex and non convex areas. Furthermore, the image streams collected during the coverage tasks were post-processed using image stitching for obtaining a single overview of the covered scene. •2D aerial visual area coverage is proposed.•Coverage path planner is integrated with camera footprint.•Inspection of a convex and non-convex 2D area using UAV is investigated.•The image streams collected during the coverage task are post-processed.•The performance of the proposed method has been experimentally evaluated.