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With the rapid development of technology and the proliferation of uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), there is an immediate need for security solutions. Toward this end, we propose the use of a multi-robot system for autonomous and cooperative counter-UAS missions. In this paper, we present the design of the hardware and software components of different complementary robotic platforms: a mobile uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with a LiDAR sensor, an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) with a gimbal-mounted stereo camera for air-to-air inspections, and a UAV with a capture mechanism equipped with radars and camera. Our proposed system features 1) scalability to larger areas due to the distributed approach and online processing, 2) long-term cooperative missions, and 3) complementary multimodal perception for the detection of multirotor UAVs. In field experiments, we demonstrate the integration of all subsystems in accomplishing a counter-UAS task within an unstructured environment. The obtained results confirm the promising direction of using multi-robot and multi-modal systems for C-UAS.
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Bird's eye view: Cooperative exploration by UGV and UAV
This paper proposes a solution to the problem of cooperative exploration using an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). More specifically, the UGV navigates through the free space, and the UAV provides enhanced situational awareness via its higher vantage point. The motivating application is search and rescue in a damaged building. A camera atop the UGV is used to track a fiducial tag on the underside of the UAV, allowing the UAV to maintain a fixed pose relative to the UGV. Furthermore, the UAV uses its front facing camera to provide a birds-eye-view to the remote operator, allowing for observation beyond obstacles that obscure the UGV's sensors. The proposed approach has been tested using a TurtleBot 2 equipped with a Hokuyo laser ranger finder and a Parrot Bebop 2. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. This work is based on several open source packages and the generated code is available on-line.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637876
- PAR ID:
- 10127556
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 247 to 255
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2017.7991513
