• GVP-MREP
  • Overview
  • Setup
  • Parameters
  • Acknowledgements
  • Doing

GVP-MREP

Fast and Communication-Efficient Multi-UAV Exploration Via Voronoi Partition on Dynamic Topological Graph (IROS 2024 accepted)

1. Overview

GVP-MREP is a distributed and communication-efficient multi-UAV exploration system. For lightweight multi-UAV communication, a multi-robot dynamic topological graph (MR-DTG) is designed. Supported by MR-DTG, graph Voronoi partition (GVP) is adopted to allocate exploration tasks to each UAV. Each UAV operates GVP and optimizes trajectories to their targets distributedly.

Video Links: youtube or bilibili.

Author: Qianli Dong (Charlie Dog)

Paper: Fast and Communication-Efficient Multi-UAV Exploration Via Voronoi Partition on Dynamic Topological Graph, Qianli Dong, Haobo Xi, Shiyong Zhang, Qingchen Bi, Tianyi Li, Ziyu Wang and Xuebo Zhang, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024, accepted.

@article{dong2024fast,
  title={Fast and Communication-Efficient Multi-UAV Exploration Via Voronoi Partition on Dynamic Topological Graph},
  author={Dong, Qianli and Xi, Haobo and Zhang, Shiyong and Bi, Qingchen and Li, Tianyi and Wang, Ziyu and Zhang, Xuebo},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.05808},
  year={2024}
}

2. Setup

This work is developed in Ubuntu 20.04, ROS noetic.

Prerequisites:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-joy ros-noetic-octomap-ros python3-wstool python3-catkin-tools protobuf-compiler libgoogle-glog-dev ros-noetic-control-toolbox ros-noetic-mavros libzmqpp-dev

Simulation environment: We adopt RotorS as the simulation platform. To adapt to the scenario of multi-UAV exploration, we have made some modifications. You can get the modified version with:

$ mkdir -p rotors-ws/src
$ cd rotors-ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/NKU-UAVTeam/rotors-modified.git
$ git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/mav_comm.git
$ git clone https://github.com/catkin/catkin_simple.git
$ cd ..
$ catkin_make 

# if report error: "‘mavlink_status_t’ has not been declared", $sudo apt remove ros-noetic-mavlink. install it later

$ echo "source ~/rotors-ws/devel/setup.bash --extend" >> ~/.bashrc

Clone Code and Make:

$ mkdir -p GVP-MREP/src
$ cd GVP-MREP/src
$ git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/gflags_catkin.git
$ git clone https://github.com/ethz-asl/glog_catkin.git
$ git clone https://github.com/catkin/catkin_simple.git
$ git clone https://github.com/NKU-MobFly-Robotics/GVP-MREP.git
$ cd ..
$ catkin_make

Run Exploration:

$ source devel/setup.bash
$ roslaunch murder_swarm murder_swarm_maze4.launch #small maze
#or
$ roslaunch murder_swarm murder_swarm_maze3.launch #large maze
#or
$ roslaunch murder_swarm murder_swarm_testcity.launch #city

Mamba bless your UAV!

3. Parameters

Exploration Space: murder_maze3.yaml, murder_maze3_ground.yaml | murder_maze4.yaml, murder_maze4_ground.yaml

# exploration bounding box
Exp/minX: -20.0
Exp/minY: -20.0
Exp/minZ: 0.0
Exp/maxX: 20.0
Exp/maxY: 20.0
Exp/maxZ: 3.0

# map size (larger than the exploration bounding box)
block_map/minX: -22.5
block_map/minY: -22.5
block_map/minZ: -0.1
block_map/maxX: 22.5
block_map/maxY: 22.5
block_map/maxZ: 3.5

In murder_swarm_maze3.launch | murder_swarm_maze4.launch.Set the number of swarm:

  <arg name="drone_num" value="10" />

In murder_maze4.yaml, murder_maze3_ground.yaml | murder_maze4.yaml, murder_maze4_ground.yaml. This will cause larger communication volume. If you wanna see the explored map immediately：

block_map/vis_mode: true

In murder_maze4.yaml, murder_maze3_ground.yaml | murder_maze4.yaml, murder_maze4_ground.yaml. Set the data recording path. Moreover, make sure there exists a directory: "/home/charliedog/data/swarm/maze4/MURDER/n" (for "n" UAVs):

Computation/dir: /home/charliedog/data/swarm/maze4/MURDER

4. Acknowledgements

We use MINCO for trajectory planning.

5. Doing

The code annotation is comming soon.