Cooperative Architecture Using Air and Ground Vehicles for the Search and Recognition of Targets

Abstract

A cooperative navigation architecture for the search and recognition of targets using aerial and ground vehicles is proposed in this paper. The architecture allows managing aerial and ground vehicles to autonomously perform different tasks independently or cooperatively. For our application, two main tasks are conceived: aerial monitoring of a surface to search for targets and target ground recognition. In the target aerial detection task, the aerial drone autonomously follows a trajectory computed to cover the entire surface to be monitored, searching for targets using vision algorithms. Once a target is detected, its relative position is sent to the cooperative architecture. After the aerial drone has covered the entire area, the architecture computes and assigns each ground vehicle the closest target found. Each ground vehicle then navigates autonomously, avoiding obstacles if present, to its assigned target. To verify the success of the mission, the aerial vehicle flies following the dynamic center of mass of the ground vehicles. Real-time experiments are carried out to validate the proposed architecture. The main results, depicted in some graphs, corroborate the good performance in a closed loop.