Visual Coverage Control for Teams of Quadcopters via Control Barrier Functions

This paper presents a coverage control strategy for teams of quadcopters that ensures that no area is left unsurveyed in between the fields of view of the visual sensors mounted on the quadcopters. We present a locational cost that quantifies the team's coverage performance according to the sensors' performance function. Moreover, the cost function penalizes overlaps between the fields of view of the different sensors, with the objective of increasing the area covered by the team. A distributed control law is derived for the quadcopters so that they adjust their position and zoom according to the direction of ascent of the cost. Control barrier functions are implemented to ensure that, while executing the gradient ascent control law, no holes appear in between the fields of view of neighboring robots. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated in simulated experiments.