UAV/UGV cooperation for surveying operations in humanitarian demining

Abstract

Unmanned Ground Vehicles can be a useful tool to help operators in humanitarian demining. However in many difficult environments autonomous operations are impossible and moreover it can be really difficult to teleoperate the robot from an onboard camera. This work presents an architecture to allow cooperation between a ground robot and a quadrotor UAV. The UAV can autonomously follow the ground robot, by using an image processing algorithm. In this way aerial images are provided that can help trajectory planning in rough environments, via a developed webGIS platform.