UAV-UGV Cooperative 3D Environmental Mapping

Abstract

The primary advantages of utilizing a mobile robot, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), are its autonomous navigation and data collection capabilities from a large-scale environment. However, the UGV is restricted by its limited perception ability in a cluttered environment. To address this limitation, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can cooperate with the UGV and build out a detailed and complete map. The objectives of this study are to operate aerial and ground robots cooperatively and to fuse point cloud data complementarily. This paper introduces an autonomous cooperation framework using UGV and UAV for 3D geometric data collection in a dynamic cluttered environment. First, UAV is deployed and collects 3D terrain data by using photo images to get an overall idea of the target site. Then, the path planning and stationary scanning locations for UGV are estimated using the gradient-based 3D model generated by UAV. This method was tested on a real-world construction site and obtained promising results. The proposed UAV-UGV cooperative robotic approach is expected to reduce human intervention in data collection and data processing time significantly. Furthermore, it enables frequent monitoring, updating, and analyzing a cluttered environment for timely decision making.