Field Tests with an Aerial-Ground Convoy System for Collaborative Tasks

Abstract

This chapter presents the design, implementation and field experiments of a convoy between an aerial and a terrestrial robot. The convoy strategy proposed is indeed very simple and based in a PD control law. We introduce the robots Pinky and Gaia, robots which have been part of the FRACTAL fleet, the general system set up is also addressed, such as the ground station workloads and the middleware architecture. Finally, comprehensive experimental results shown herein, demonstrate the good performance and usability of the system in multi-robot behavioral research.