Autonomous Aerial Dual-Target Following Among Obstacles

Following more than one target with a single chaser drone is challenged by visibility issues that a single-target setup does not face: inter-target occlusion and a limited field of view, on top of the usual risk of occlusion and collision with obstacles. This work builds a visibility score field for two targets that accounts for the field-of-view limit and inter-target occlusion, together with a fast sweeping algorithm to compute that field in real time. A hierarchical planning pipeline then uses the field to generate a chasing motion, and the full system is demonstrated on a real drone following two targets among obstacles.

Published in IEEE Access, 2021.