Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Multi-UAV Planning and Lessons Learned

TL;DR

The paper introduces CARIC, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating heterogeneous multi-UAV planning algorithms through simulation scenarios, software tools, and competition insights, advancing research in cooperative aerial inspection.

Contribution

It presents a new simulation benchmark with diverse scenarios, software tools, and evaluation metrics for multi-UAV planning, along with analysis of top competition solutions.

Findings

Top teams used innovative exploration and task allocation strategies.

The benchmark revealed the complexity of multi-UAV inspection tasks.

Insights suggest directions for future cooperative UAV research.

Abstract

We propose the Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge (CARIC), a simulation-based benchmark for motion planning algorithms in heterogeneous multi-UAV systems. CARIC features UAV teams with complementary sensors, realistic constraints, and evaluation metrics prioritizing inspection quality and efficiency. It offers a ready-to-use perception-control software stack and diverse scenarios to support the development and evaluation of task allocation and motion planning algorithms. Competitions using CARIC were held at IEEE CDC 2023 and the IROS 2024 Workshop on Multi-Robot Perception and Navigation, attracting innovative solutions from research teams worldwide. This paper examines the top three teams from CDC 2023, analyzing their exploration, inspection, and task allocation strategies while drawing insights into their performance across scenarios. The results highlight the task's complexity and suggest promising directions for future research in cooperative multi-UAV systems.