Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Journal articles
  4. On the Scalability of Vision-based Drone Swarms in the Presence of Occlusions
 
research article

On the Scalability of Vision-based Drone Swarms in the Presence of Occlusions

Schilling, Fabian  
•
Soria, Enrica  
•
Floreano, Dario  
March 10, 2022
IEEE Access

Vision-based drone swarms have recently emerged as a promising alternative to address the fault-tolerance and flexibility limitations of centralized and communication-based aerial collective systems. Although most vision-based control algorithms rely on the detection of neighbors, they usually neglect critical perceptual factors such as visual occlusions and their effect on the scalability of the swarm. To estimate the impact of occlusions on the detection of neighbors, we propose a simple but perceptually realistic visual neighbor selection model that discards obstructed agents. We evaluate the visibility model using a potential-field-based flocking algorithm with up to one thousand agents, showing that occlusions have adverse effects on the inter-agent distances and velocity alignment as the swarm scales up, both in terms of group size and density. In particular, we find that small agent displacements have considerable effects on neighbor visibility and lead to control discontinuities. We show that the destabilizing effects of visibility switches, i.e., agents continuously becoming visible or invisible, can be mitigated if agents select their neighbors from adjacent Voronoi regions. We validate the resulting flocking algorithm using up to one hundred agents with quadcopter dynamics and subject to sensor noise in a high-fidelity physics simulator. The results show that Voronoi-based interactions enable vision-based swarms to remain collision-free, ordered, and cohesive in the presence of occlusions. These results are consistent across group sizes, agent number densities, and relative localization noise. The source code and experimental data are available at https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel.

  • Files
  • Details
  • Metrics
Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3158758
Author(s)
Schilling, Fabian  
Soria, Enrica  
Floreano, Dario  
Date Issued

2022-03-10

Published in
IEEE Access
Volume

10

Start page

1

End page

14

Subjects

unmanned aerial vehicles

•

multi-robot systems

•

agent-based modeling

•

scalability

•

vision

•

robotics

URL

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ

Article on IEEE Xplore

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9732989

Code on GitHub

https://github.com/lis-epfl/vmodel

Video on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-O85lB_DJQ
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIS  
FunderGrant Number

FNS

200021-155907

RelationURL/DOI

Cites

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/283488

IsSupplementedBy

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AAGuwprqAA7-n2VAQgh2Qv89Yp3DpoFA

IsSupplementedBy

https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/PYEjRdu6LVzE6Qg
Available on Infoscience
March 15, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/186444
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés