Multi-UAV handoff planner ensures continuous target tracking during transfers
HARP: Handoff-Aware Recovery Planning for Active Target Acquisition in Multi-UAV Handoff
Robotics
Summary
Tracking a moving object with drones often requires handing the job from one drone to another without losing sight. The authors created HARP, a system that helps the new drone quickly find and follow the target even if it has no prior view. HARP plans its moves carefully by predicting where the object and the sending drone might be, avoiding obstacles and keeping the first drone’s view safe. It succeeds in simulations and real-world tests, handling both view problems and physical blockages.
What this means in practice
- •For drone operations teams: Maintain seamless target tracking when handing control between multiple drones in surveillance or monitoring missions.
- •For autonomous vehicle developers: Improve multi-robot coordination algorithms by incorporating handoff-aware recovery strategies to handle occlusions and limited views.
Authors
Heegyeong Kim, Alice James, Avishkar Seth, Endrowednes Kuantama, Richard Han
Abstract
Continuous aerial tracking often requires multiple drones to maintain target coverage over long periods. During handoff, the receiving UAV may lack prior target observations and must actively acquire a usable view without disrupting the sender's ongoing coverage. This work introduces HARP, a handoff-aware recovery planner that registers bounded sender predictions in the receiver's local map, distinguishes field-of-view failure from physical occlusion, and generates failure-specific yaw, translation, and parallax viewpoints. Candidate motions are checked for receiver clearance, sender-fiducial observability, protected sender--target visibility, temporal validity, and deadline compliance. When a complete trajectory cannot be admitted, HARP may execute a sampled admissible nonzero prefix and replan from updated evidence. In simulation, HARP acquired the target in all 49 standard trials and in 15 of 16 stress trials. Field trials validated HARP's recovery geometry under field-of-view limitation and environmental occlusions.