Cooperative μUAV-UGV autonomous indoor surveillance

In this paper, we present a heterogenous UGV-UAV system cooperatively solving tasks of periodical surveillance in indoor environments. In the proposed scenario, the UGV is equipped with an interactive helipad and it acts as a carrier of the UAV. The UAV is a light-weight quadro-rotor helicopter equipped with two cameras, which are used to inspect locations inaccessible for the UGV. The paper is focused on the most crucial aspects of the proposed UAV-UGV periodical surveillance that are visual navigation, localization and autonomous landing that need to be done periodically. We propose two concepts of mobile helipads employed for correction of imprecise landing of the UAV. Beside the description of the visual navigation, relative localization and both helipads, a study of landing performance is provided. The performance of the complex system is proven by an experiment of autonomous periodical surveillance in a changing environment with presence of people.

[1]  Drago Matko,et al.  Quadrocopter Hovering Using Position-estimation Information from Inertial Sensors and a High-delay Video System , 2012, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[2]  Jan Faigl,et al.  AR-Drone as a Platform for Robotic Research and Education , 2011, Eurobot Conference.

[3]  Lukas Pastorek,et al.  Batch FCM with volume prototypes for clustering high-dimensional datasets with large number of clusters , 2011, 2011 Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing.

[4]  Christopher Bolkcom,et al.  Homeland Security: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Border Surveillance , 2004 .

[5]  Libor Preucil,et al.  Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation , 2010, J. Field Robotics.

[6]  Nicolas Petit,et al.  The Navigation and Control technology inside the AR.Drone micro UAV , 2011 .

[7]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Fast scale invariant feature detection and matching on programmable graphics hardware , 2008, 2008 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops.

[8]  Sven Lange,et al.  A vision based onboard approach for landing and position control of an autonomous multirotor UAV in GPS-denied environments , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Advanced Robotics.

[9]  Renato Zaccaria,et al.  GPS-based localization for a surveillance UGV in outdoor areas , 2005, Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Robot Motion and Control, 2005. RoMoCo '05..

[10]  Jan Faigl,et al.  Simple yet stable bearing-only navigation , 2010 .

[11]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) , 2008, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[12]  Tomas Vintr,et al.  Autonomous Robot Navigation Based on Clustering across Images , 2011, Eurobot Conference.

[13]  David A. Anisi,et al.  Survey of patrolling algorithms for surveillance UGVs , 2007 .