Marsupial Walking-and-Flying Robotic Deployment for Collaborative Exploration of Unknown Environments
Paolo De Petris, Shehryar Khattak, Mihir Dharmadhikari, Gabriel, Waibel, Huan Nguyen, Markus Montenegro, Nikhil Khedekar, Kostas Alexis, Marco, Hutter

TL;DR
This paper presents a hybrid marsupial robotic system combining a quadruped and a drone for collaborative exploration of complex environments, enabling deployment and coordinated mapping in challenging terrains.
Contribution
It introduces a novel marsupial system-of-systems with autonomous deployment and collaborative mapping capabilities for heterogeneous robots in unknown environments.
Findings
Successful deployment of drone from ground robot in experiments
Enhanced exploration of inaccessible areas using combined system
Autonomous path planning and deployment decision-making demonstrated
Abstract
This work contributes a marsupial robotic system-of-systems involving a legged and an aerial robot capable of collaborative mapping and exploration path planning that exploits the heterogeneous properties of the two systems and the ability to selectively deploy the aerial system from the ground robot. Exploiting the dexterous locomotion capabilities and long endurance of quadruped robots, the marsupial combination can explore within large-scale and confined environments involving rough terrain. However, as certain types of terrain or vertical geometries can render any ground system unable to continue its exploration, the marsupial system can - when needed - deploy the flying robot which, by exploiting its 3D navigation capabilities, can undertake a focused exploration task within its endurance limitations. Focusing on autonomy, the two systems can co-localize and map together by sharing…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
