Experiments in Multirobot Air-Ground Coordination

Luiz Chaimowicz, University of Pennsylvania
Ben Grocholsky, University of Pennsylvania
James F. Keller, University of Pennsylvania
R. Vijay Kumar, University of Pennsylvania
Camillo J. Taylor, University of Pennsylvania

Article comments

Copyright 2004 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2004 (ICRA 2004) Volume 4, pages 4053-4058.
Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/

This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of coordinating aerial and ground vehicles in tasks that involve exploration, identification of targets and maintaining a connected communication network. We focus on the problem of localizing vehicles in urban environments where GPS signals are often unreliable or unavailable. We first describe our multi-robot tesbed and control software used to coordinate ground and aerial vehicles. We present the results of experiments in air-ground localization analyzing three complementary approaches to determining the positions of vehicles on the ground. We show that the coordination of aerial vehicles with ground vehicles is necessary to get accurate estimates of the state of the system.