RACER: Rapid Collaborative Exploration With a Decentralized Multi-UAV System

Although the use of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has great potential for fast autonomous exploration, it has received far too little attention. In this article, we present a RApid Collaborative ExploRation (RACER) approach using a fleet of decentralized UAVs. To effectively dispatch the UAVs, a pairwise interaction based on an online hgrid space decomposition is used. It ensures that all UAVs simultaneously explore distinct regions, using only asynchronous and limited communication. Furthermore, we optimize the coverage paths of unknown space and balance the workloads partitioned to each UAV with a capacitated vehicle routing problem formulation. Given the task allocation, each UAV constantly…