Motion Control for Aerial and Ground Vehicle Autonomous Platooning

摘要

In this paper a navigation control for a platoon composed by a ground and an aerial vehicle is proposed. While the first one (a mobile robot, equipped with a LiDAR) visit desired points avoiding obstacles, the second one (a cheap quadrotor equipped with a vertical camera pointing to the floor) follows it both in position and orientation. The problem is related to the perception layer, autonomous visual control of the drone and autonomous control of the ground robotic vehicle. To control the quadrotor, we propose in this paper an aerial visual-servoing methodology based on an Image Based Visual Servoing (IBVS) algorithm applied to the image given by onboarded camera. A new variant of the Dynamic Window Approach methodology was developed in order to control the motions of the ground robotic vehicle. Preliminary experimental results presented show the efficacy of our aerial-ground platooning methodology.