Civil infrastructure data acquisition in urban environments based on multi-UAV mission

Increased capabilities of modern unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in terms of autonomy and payload operations lead towards development of multi-agent UAV systems. While the multi-UAV systems have a great potential in many different scenarios, increasing complexity of missions gave raise to a new set of problems. Some of them include high workload periods of a single operator supervising multiple agents, loss of the situation awareness, increased amount of the data generated by the system and problems in communication channels between the operator and UAVs. All of them could lead to performance degradation in the mission execution or even critical failures of system elements. In general, there are two aspects that help to avoid or at least to decrease mentioned problems - mission planning and human-machine interface (HMI) design. In this paper, we mainly address the mission planning aspect and only briefly present an HMI design that allows simultaneous handling of three UAVs in civil infrastructure data acquisition missions. The proposed interface, among the standard telemetry data, includes data download/upload from/to external services, a trajectory planner and the acquired data representation. The proposed architecture has been tested in a simulation and in a real environment.