Aerial-Ground Robotic system for Terrain estimation and Navigation

Unmanned ground vehicles and aerial vehicles can utilize their complementary features to address each other's inabilities like limited payload capacity, endurance, agility and field of view and thereby improving the mission efficiency. This paper presents an in-house developed ground and a micro aerial vehicle system performing a coordinated mission. The aerial vehicle is equipped with a stereo image sensor using which the environment around the ground vehicle is reconstructed in the form of an elevation map. This is then processed to get 2D traversability map based on which the ground vehicle performs path planning for a specified goal. The aerial robot also gives a sparse feature map which is used by the ground vehicle for initialization of its pose in the map. A pure pursuit controller for path following is implemented for both aerial and ground vehicle. Most of the proposed concepts are implemented and demonstrated on a real platform. This work also aims to build a base for developing in-house controllers and localization filters that can be used for real-time testing thereby decreasing the time for development.