An Integrated Aerial and Ground Vehicle (UAV-UGV) System for Automated Data Collection for Indoor Construction Sites

Abstract

Over the past few years, there have been many efforts to increase the degree of automation and frequency of data collection for construction applications using unmanned aerial/ground vehicles (UAV/UGV). However, the current practice of data collection is traditionally performed, which is manual, costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. The current vision-based mobile robotic platforms suffer from a series of performance issues such as being inefficient for autonomous navigation in cluttered indoor scenes with many objects on the grounds, where some places are inaccessible by a UGV. To address this issue, this paper proposes a mobile robotic system that integrates two mobile robots, a ground vehicle and an aerial micro blimp. The key aspects for the development of this system capable of autonomous navigation are efficient path planning, localization of both ground and aerial robot, and mapping of the surrounding environment. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, it is implemented on a hallway for the data collection purposes. The results demonstrate the robustness and feasibility of deploying this system for automated data collection in the near future.