Software & Data Downloads — ros2_caric

ROS 2 Cooperative Aerial Robots Inspection Challenge for infrastructure inspection using a team of heterogeneous drones.

We present a coordinated aerial inspection framework in which heterogeneous drones collaborate to map infrastructure, detect points of interest, and capture high-quality inspection imagery. Building on the ROS 1 Cooperative Aerial Robots Inspection Challenge (CARIC), this release provides a ROS 2/PX4 implementation and a hierarchical coordination framework that combines multi-agent task assignment with continuous-time, sequential-convex trajectory optimization for perception-aware photographer motion under dynamics, obstacle, and communication constraints. Across two inspection scenarios, the proposed method achieves comparable inspection quality to an A-star baseline while substantially reducing scoring mission time and balancing photographer utilization.

    •  Folorunsho, S., Hayner, C., Di Cairano, S., Vinod, A.P., "Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-101 PDF Software
      • @inproceedings{Folorunsho2026jul,
      • author = {Folorunsho, Samuel and Hayner, Christopher and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
      • title = {{Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones}},
      • booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = jul,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-101}
      • }

    Access software at https://github.com/merlresearch/ros2_caric.