Multi-Robot Control for Adaptive Caging and Tracking of a Flood Area

In this paper, a control strategy for tracking the propagation of an expanding flood zone by using a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is developed. The control strategy addresses the following two issues. One is to averagely distribute a group of UAVs along the expanding boundary of the flood zone without collisions among each other. The other is to track the propagation of the flood region by keeping its boundary within the field of vision for each UAV. A combined control algorithm is proposed for dealing with both the flocking-based control and adaptive vision-based tracking problems. The feasibility of the algorithm is verified under simulations in the ROS/Gazebo environment.