Pilot-scale development of a UAV-UGV hybrid with air-based UGV path planning

Traditionally, UAVs and Mobile Robots are viewed as two separate entities. However, upon closer examination of their synergies, a more unified conception of a closely-coupled system of the two could easily justify a view where both are just seen as separable parts of the body of a unitary hybrid symbiotic system - essentially, one robotic entity, whose body parts can separate temporarily, and get together again later. In this paper, we will describe a prototype system consisting of a small-scale indoor pilot version of a much larger outdoors full-scale system, as an illustration of this concept. Such indoor pilot versions have multiple advantages, as we shall show. In our prototype, a mobile robot UGV serves as a transport as well as recharge station for a lightweight quad-rotor UAV, while the UAV serves as a separable long-range vision system for the UGV, providing top-down views of its environment, which are stitched and transformed into maps, and which are utilized towards the navigation of the robot hybrid. Multiple avenues of extension of our system and the concept are also introduced, illustrating the power of the separable-body heterogeneous symbiotic multi-robot system concept.