Air-ground multi-agent robot team coordination

Abstract

In an indoor search and rescue mission, the two main tasks are detecting the location of survivors or broken equipments and recovering them from a building full of danger. For the outdoor robots, they can use GPS to get the path information. But in a GPS-denied environment, the robots cannot get the support from satellites. We design an air-ground robot team to provide a solution to this problem. It consists of a micro aerial vehicle with a vertical camera and a horizontal camera, and two micro ground vehicle with an ultrasonic sensor and a colour sensor. Experimental results are presented demonstrating this air-ground robot team's ability to operate successfully in indoor environments.