UAV and Service Robot Coordination for Indoor Object Search Tasks

TL;DR

This paper presents a coordinated system where a ground robot and a quadcopter work together for indoor object search, with the drone localizing itself relative to the ground robot to efficiently find objects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coordination framework and a vision-based navigation algorithm enabling a drone to localize and search objects in indoor environments alongside a service robot.

Findings

Successful indoor object search trajectories demonstrated

Effective vision-based localization of the drone relative to the ground robot

Coordination improves search efficiency in GPS-denied environments

Abstract

Our CoBot robots have successfully performed a variety of service tasks in our multi-building environment including accompanying people to meetings and delivering objects to offices due to its navigation and localization capabilities. However, they lack the capability to visually search over desks and other confined locations for an object of interest. Conversely, an inexpensive GPS-denied quadcopter platform such as the Parrot ARDrone 2.0 could perform this object search task if it had access to reasonable localization. In this paper, we propose the concept of coordination between CoBot and the Parrot ARDrone 2.0 to perform service-based object search tasks, in which CoBot localizes and navigates to the general search areas carrying the ARDrone and the ARDrone searches locally for objects. We propose a vision-based moving target navigation algorithm that enables the ARDrone to localize with respect to CoBot, search for objects, and return to the CoBot for future searches. We demonstrate our algorithm in indoor environments on several search trajectories.