Collaborative quadricopter-mobile robots ground scan using ARTAGS visual pose estimation

Abstract

The use of collaborative robot systems to perform specific tasks is a strong research area on robotic systems. Robot platforms are becoming cheaper, increasing the number of applications and new tasks variations on research labs. A collaborative system that join together small mobile robots to scan some specific area and a drone to set their position on the ground is a good example of the possible applications of this kind. This work proposes the use of an autonomous quadri-copter and “dummy” small ground robots on a collaborative task that uses virtual reality tags to estimate robot positions and orientations on a simulation scene and provide information for their control. The robots are “dummy” because do not have any embedded odometer. The position and orientation data are achieved by the drone and transmitted via ROS to a computational system that runs a PID control for each individual robot. The simulation runs on a V-REP scene and use a C++ code to control the mobile robots moves.