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.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33640
