A Collaborative Aerial-Ground Robotic System for Fast Exploration

TL;DR

This paper presents a collaborative aerial-ground robotic system that enhances exploration speed in unknown environments through integrated path planning and safety guarantees, validated by extensive experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel collaborative system combining aerial and ground robots with integrated path planning methods for faster exploration.

Findings

Higher exploration efficiency compared to single robots

Effective path planning with safety guarantees

Validated through extensive field experiments

Abstract

Autonomous exploration of unknown environments has been widely applied in inspection, surveillance, and search and rescue. In exploration task, the basic requirement for robots is to detect the unknown space as fast as possible. In this paper, we propose an autonomous collaborative system consists of an aerial robot and a ground vehicle to explore in unknown environments. We combine the frontier based method and the harmonic field to generate a path. Then, For the ground robot, a minimum jerk piecewise Bezier curve which can guarantee safety and dynamical feasibility is generated amid obstacles. For the aerial robot, a motion primitive method is adopted for local path planning. We implement the proposed framework on an autonomous collaborative aerial-ground system. Extensive field experiments as well as simulations are presented to validate the method and demonstrate its higher efficiency against each single vehicle.