UAV/UGV cooperation for surveying operations in humanitarian demining

Unmanned Ground Vehicles can be a useful tool to help operators in humanitarian demining. However in many difficult environments autonomous operations are impossible and moreover it can be really difficult to teleoperate the robot from an onboard camera. This work presents an architecture to allow cooperation between a ground robot and a quadrotor UAV. The UAV can autonomously follow the ground robot, by using an image processing algorithm. In this way aerial images are provided that can help trajectory planning in rough environments, via a developed webGIS platform.

[1]  James M. Keller,et al.  Cooperative Air and Ground Surveillance A Scalable Approach to the Detection and Localization of Targets by a Network of UAVs and UGVs , 2006 .

[2]  Huili Yu,et al.  Moving ground target tracking in urban terrain using air/ground vehicles , 2010, 2010 IEEE Globecom Workshops.

[3]  Carl Crane,et al.  Use of cooperative unmanned air and ground vehicles for detection and disposal of mines , 2005, SPIE Optics East.

[4]  Hyochoong Bang,et al.  Helicopter guidance for vision-based tracking and landing on a moving ground target , 2011, 2011 11th International Conference on Control, Automation and Systems.

[5]  Herbert G. Tanner,et al.  Switched UAV-UGV Cooperation Scheme for Target Detection , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Benjamin Grocholsky,et al.  UAV-UGV collaboration with a PackBot UGV and Raven SUAV for pursuit and tracking of a dynamic target , 2008, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[7]  L. Cantelli,et al.  Autonomous Cooperation Between UAV and UGV to Improve Navigation and Environmental Monitoring in Rough Environments , 2013 .

[8]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Cooperative air and ground surveillance , 2006, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[9]  Giovanni Muscato,et al.  Volcanic Environments: Robots for Exploration and Measurement , 2012, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[10]  Andreas Zell,et al.  An Onboard Monocular Vision System for Autonomous Takeoff, Hovering and Landing of a Micro Aerial Vehicle , 2013, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[11]  René Vidal,et al.  A hierarchical approach to probabilistic pursuit-evasion games with unmanned ground and aerial vehicles , 2001, Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.01CH37228).

[12]  Fusaomi Nagata,et al.  Robotics for rescue and risky intervention , 2011, IECON 2011 - 37th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.

[13]  O. Meister,et al.  Teaming of an UGV with a VTOL-UAV in urban environments , 2008, 2008 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium.

[14]  Arne Roennau,et al.  Enhancing sensor capabilities of walking robots through cooperative exploration with aerial robots , 2013 .

[15]  Sungmoon Joo,et al.  Polymorphic Control Reconfiguration in an Autonomous UAV with UGV Collaboration , 2008, 2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference.

[16]  Mart Tamre,et al.  Aerial imagery terrain classification for long-range autonomous navigation , 2009, 2009 International Symposium on Optomechatronic Technologies.

[17]  Ricardo Carelli,et al.  Decentralized Control of a Formation Involving a Miniature Helicopter and a Team of Ground Robots Based on Artificial Vision , 2010, 2010 Latin American Robotics Symposium and Intelligent Robotics Meeting.

[18]  George J. Vachtsevanos,et al.  Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles , 2014 .

[19]  T. Krajnik,et al.  Cooperative μUAV-UGV autonomous indoor surveillance , 2012, International Multi-Conference on Systems, Sygnals & Devices.

[20]  Steven Lake Waslander,et al.  Coordinated landing of a quadrotor on a skid-steered ground vehicle in the presence of time delays , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[21]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Synergies in Feature Localization by Air-Ground Robot Teams , 2004, ISER.

[22]  Andreas Zell,et al.  Automatic Take Off, Tracking and Landing of a Miniature UAV on a Moving Carrier Vehicle , 2011, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[23]  Luiz Chaimowicz,et al.  Deploying Air-Ground Multi-Robot Teams in Urban Environments , 2005 .