Field Tests with an Aerial-Ground Convoy System for Collaborative Tasks

This chapter presents the design, implementation and field experiments of a convoy between an aerial and a terrestrial robot. The convoy strategy proposed is indeed very simple and based in a PD control law. We introduce the robots Pinky and Gaia, robots which have been part of the FRACTAL fleet, the general system set up is also addressed, such as the ground station workloads and the middleware architecture. Finally, comprehensive experimental results shown herein, demonstrate the good performance and usability of the system in multi-robot behavioral research.

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

[2]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Experiments in multirobot air-ground coordination , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[3]  Dirk Holz,et al.  Teleoperated Visual Inspection and Surveillance with Unmanned Ground and Aerial Vehicles , 2008, Int. J. Online Eng..

[4]  H.H.T. Liu,et al.  A cooperative UAV/UGV platform for wildfire detection and fighting , 2008, 2008 Asia Simulation Conference - 7th International Conference on System Simulation and Scientific Computing.

[5]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  Pursuit-evasion games with unmanned ground and aerial vehicles , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).