Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Multi-Uncrewed-Aerial-Vehicle Planning and Lessons Learned

We propose the Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge (CARIC), a simulation-based benchmark for motion planning algorithms in heterogeneous multi-uncrewed-aerial-vehicle (UAV) systems. CARIC features UAV teams with complementary sensors, realistic constraints, and evaluation metrics prioritizing inspection quality and efficiency. It offers a ready-to-use perception-control software stack and diverse scenarios to support the development and evaluation of task allocation and motion planning algorithms. Competitions using CARIC were held at the 2023 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and the IROS 2024 Workshop on Multi-Robot Perception and Navigation, attracting innovative solutions from research teams worldwide. This article examines the top three teams from CDC 2023, analyzing their exploration, inspection, and task allocation strategies while drawing insights into their performance across scenarios. The results highlight the task’s complexity and suggest promising research directions in cooperative multi-UAV systems. The simulation framework, including the source code and detailed instructions, is publicly available at https://ntu-aris.github.io/caric.