Multi-robot active perception for fast andefficient scene reconstruction.

The efficiency of path-planning in robot navigation is crucial in tasks, such as search-and-rescue and disaster surveying, but this is emphasised even more when considering multi-rotor aerial robots due to the limited battery and flight time. In this spirit, this Master Thesis proposes an efficient, hierarchical planner to achieve a comprehensive visual coverage of large-scale outdoor scenarios for small drones. Following an initial reconnaissance flight, a coarse map of the scene gets built in real-time. Then, regions of the map that were not appropriately observed are identified and grouped by a novel perception-aware clustering process that enables the generation of continuous trajectories (sweeps) to cover them efficiently. Thanks to this partitioning of the map in a set of tasks, we are able to generalize the planning to an arbitrary number of drones and perform a well-balanced workload distribution among them. We compare our approach to an alternative state-of-the-art method for exploration and show the advantages of our pipeline in terms of efficiency for obtaining coverage in large environments.