Synergies in Feature Localization by Air-Ground Robot Teams

Abstract. This paper describes the implementation of a decentralized architecture for autonomous teams of aerial and ground vehicles engaged in active perception. We provide a theoretical framework based on an established approach to the underlying sensor fusion problem [3]. This provides transparent integration of information from heterogeneous sources. The approach is extended to include an information-theoretic utility measure that captures the task objective and robot inter-dependencies. A distributed solution mechanism is employed to determine information maximizing trajectories and assignments subject to the constraints of individual vehicle and sensor sub-systems. This architecture enables the benefit of the complementary aerial and ground based vehicle and sensor capabilities to be realized. The approach is applied to missions involving searching for and tracking multiple ground targets. Experimental results for vehicles equipped with cameras are presented. These illustrate the impact of the team configuration on overall system performance.

[1]  J. Magnus,et al.  Matrix Differential Calculus with Applications in Statistics and Econometrics , 1991 .

[2]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Fly spy: lightweight localization and target tracking for cooperating ground and air robots , 2000 .

[3]  V. Kumar,et al.  Ad hoc networks for localization and control , 2002, Proceedings of the 41st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2002..

[4]  M. Ridley,et al.  Tracking in decentralised air-ground sensing networks , 2002, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Fusion. FUSION 2002. (IEEE Cat.No.02EX5997).

[5]  Feng Zhao,et al.  Information-Driven Dynamic Sensor Collaboration for Tracking Applications , 2002 .

[6]  Alonzo Kelly,et al.  Integrated Air/Ground Vehicle System for Semi-Autonomous Off-Road Navigation , 2002 .

[7]  Camillo J. Taylor,et al.  Dynamic Sensor Planning and Control for Optimally Tracking Targets , 2003, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[8]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Scan Alignment and 3-D Surface Modeling with a Helicopter Platform , 2003, FSR.

[9]  Alexei Makarenko,et al.  Scalable Control of Decentralised Sensor Platforms , 2003, IPSN.

[10]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Experimental cooperative control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[11]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Value-based action selection for exploration and dynamic target observation with robot teams , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.