Visual Coverage Using Autonomous Mobile Robots for Search and Rescue Applications

This paper focuses on visual sensing of 3D large-scale environments. Specifically, we consider a setting where a group of robots equipped with a camera must fully cover a surrounding area. To address this problem we propose a novel descriptor for visual coverage that aims at measuring visual information of an area based on a regular discretization of the environment in voxels. Moreover, we propose an autonomous cooperative exploration approach which controls the robot movements so to maximize information accuracy (defined based on our visual coverage descriptor) and minimizing movement costs. Finally, we define a simulation scenario based on real visual data and on widely used robotic tools (such as ROS and Stage) to empirically evaluate our approach. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms a baseline random approach and an uncoordinated one, thus being a valid solution for visual coverage in large scale outdoor scenarios.