Unmanned aerial and ground vehicle (UAV-UGV) system prototype for civil infrastructure missions

摘要

This paper develops notional technical design requirements for a team of autonomous air and ground vehicles for civil infrastructure inspection. Such a heterogeneous robot team can produce augmented maps of regions of interest with wider coverage and reduced uncertainty compared to mapping done by either platform alone because of the ability to exploit drastically different vantage points. In cases where visual scanning provides insufficient data, the aerial vehicle can deliver a ground vehicle equipped with additional sensors for nondestructive testing. State-of-the-art implementations support the validity of such a system, and preliminary testing suggests future work.