From Sketch Prior to Trajectories: A Mission-Oriented Coordinated Navigation Framework for Indoor UAV Swarm

2026-07-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of coordinating indoor task-oriented drone swarms that must sequentially visit designated areas yet lack effective mechanisms to leverage sketch maps for collaborative navigation. To this end, the authors propose a task-driven hierarchical cooperative navigation framework that, for the first time, integrates sketch priors—such as floor plans—with task sequences. The framework constructs a task-aware traversability representation by topologically aligning prior sketches with online observations, and generates safe, feasible trajectories through a combined strategy of 2D guidance-based path planning and guidance-driven 3D trajectory optimization. The approach supports multi-drone coordination under both normal and disrupted communication conditions and extends naturally to multi-floor environments. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world multi-room settings demonstrate its effectiveness in executing sequential tasks, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and multi-agent coordination.

Abstract

UAV swarm for applications, such as indoor inspection, security patrol, and logistics delivery, are often mission-oriented rather than exploration-oriented. In these tasks, UAVs are required to visit task-relevant regions in a prescribed sequence, and such region-level mission information can often be obtained from pre-deployment sketch-map priors, such as floor plans, CAD layouts, or evacuation diagrams. Although these tasks are executed in three-dimensional space, UAVs usually fly within a specific altitude layer or a nearly fixed altitude range on each floor, making mission-level region transitions mainly governed by planar connectivity. Based on these observations, this paper proposes a mission-oriented coordinated navigation framework that exploits sketch-map priors for multi-UAV indoor operations. Onboard observations are used to perform topological alignment, and the aligned prior is fused with online observations to construct a mission-oriented traversability representation. A layered 2D--3D coordinated navigation framework is further developed, where 2D guided path planning generates mission-oriented guide paths and guide-driven 3D trajectory optimization produces dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories. Simulation and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in structured multi-room indoor environments and further demonstrate its coordinated navigation capability under both communication-available and communication-loss conditions. Multi-floor simulation results show the scalability of the system to layered indoor structures.

Problem

• UAV swarm
• mission-oriented navigation
• sketch-map prior
• indoor coordination
• trajectory planning

Innovation

• sketch-map prior
• mission-oriented navigation
• 2D–3D coordinated planning
• topological alignment
• UAV swarm coordination