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

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.