Cooperative control and modeling for narrow passage traversal with an ornithopter MAV and lightweight ground station

Abstract

The power, size, and weight constraints of micro air vehicles (MAVs) limit their on-board sensing and computational resources. Ground vehicles have less mobility than MAVs, but relaxed size constraints, and typically more computing power. These specializations present many opportunities for robot-robot cooperation. In this work, we demonstrate cooperative target-seeking between a 13 gram ornithopter MAV and a lightweight ground station using computer vision. We develop models for the ornithopter, ground station, and cooperative system dynamics. We determine model parameters of the real systems through experimental system identification. Finally, we verify those models using experiments on narrow passage traversal, and arrive at a cooperative system model which accurately predicts the backwardsreachable