Coordinated perception by teams of aerial and ground robots

Benjamin P. Grocholsky; Rahul Swaminathan; Vijay Kumar; Camillo J. Taylor; George J. Pappas

doi:10.1117/12.571769

29 December 2004 Coordinated perception by teams of aerial and ground robots

Benjamin P. Grocholsky, Rahul Swaminathan, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor, George J. Pappas

Proceedings Volume 5609, Mobile Robots XVII; (2004) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.571769
Event: Optics East, 2004, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

Abstract

Air and ground vehicles exhibit complementary capabilities and characteristics as robotic sensor platforms. Fixed wing aircraft offer broad field of view and rapid coverage of search areas. However, minimum operating airspeed and altitude limits, combined with attitude uncertainty, place a lower limit on their ability to detect and localize ground features. Ground vehicles on the other hand offer high resolution sensing over relatively short ranges with the disadvantage of slow coverage. This paper presents a decentralized architecture and solution methodology for seamlessly realizing the collaborative potential of air and ground robotic sensor platforms. We provide a framework based on an established approach to the underlying sensor fusion problem. This provides transparent integration of information from heterogeneous sources. An information-theoretic utility measure captures the task objective and robot inter-dependencies. A simple distributed solution mechanism is employed to determine team member sensing trajectories subject to the constraints of individual vehicle and sensor sub-systems. The architecture is applied to a mission involving searching for and localizing an unknown number of targets in an user specified search area. Results for a team of two fixed wing UAVs and two all terrain UGVs equipped with vision sensors are presented.

Citation Download Citation

Benjamin P. Grocholsky, Rahul Swaminathan, Vijay Kumar, Camillo J. Taylor, and George J. Pappas "Coordinated perception by teams of aerial and ground robots", Proc. SPIE 5609, Mobile Robots XVII, (29 December 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.571769

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