Reliability-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning using a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Graceful degradation is a desirable trait in applications that require coverage with real, failure-prone robots. This paper uses methods informed by Reliability Engineering to study the Reliability-Aware Multi-Agent Coverage Path Planning (RA-MCPP) problem. An augmented stochastic framework is applied to evaluate a strategy’s probability of mission completion (PoC) on 3D lattice graph environments. A Genetic Algorithm optimisation approach is then proposed to find RA-MCPP path plans which maximise PoC. It is shown that the GA provides good solutions at reasonable runtimes, complementing previous approaches which focused on global opti-mality guarantees at the cost of massive computation, especially for medium and large environments.

Publication
AAMAS ‘21: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems