Aerial and ground robots networked with the environment

This paper presents a system for the cooperation of aerial and ground robots networked with other objects, including the nodes of wireless sensor networks, in outdoor environments. The system allows the centralized or distributed execution of missions. The robot team can provide transport, communication relay and localization services to other robots (or sensor nodes) during the mission. The distributed allocation of services and tasks to the robots has been implemented using a market based approach. The paper presents one experiment with a team of heterogeneous robots (aerial and ground) cooperating with objects in a mission of re detection and extinguishing.