Applications of Ergodic Control for Unmanned Aerial Systems
Ergodic control methods enable various applications in robotics where some form of exploration or coverage is required, defined by a target distribution. This naturally arises in applications such as surface cleaning, exploration, data collection for learning, localization, surveillance, or manipulation tasks. Ergodic control generates control signals that guide unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) so that they spend time in areas proportional to the density of an arbitrary spatial distribution (e.g., the probability distribution of a target’s appearance). With minor modifications, ergodic control algorithms allow for coverage of dynamically changing distributions while considering the technical capabilities and limitations of the agents. Such control represents an ideal approach for guiding UAVs in search and rescue missions (on land, but also in dynamic conditions on the sea surface), spraying, cleaning, surveillance, and similar applications.