Air-ground cooperating robots: Applications and challenges

Researches on air-ground robot cooperating system has been made recently. The cooperation among homogeneous robots focused on the architecture of the system, quality and influence of the communication. In contrast, the cooperation among heterogeneous robots such as aerial vehicle and ground vehicle robots has not been much handled. There are a couple of main points for those air-ground cooperating robots. One is using UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) as an extra sensor of UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle). This kind of application is usually used in situations such as guiding UGV to an appropriate path which could be better determined from the eye in the sky as UAV. The other main application of air-ground cooperating robot system is the localization. By combining sensor information from both UAV and UGV, the robot system as a whole can localize a target object or find features in the environment with better performance than UGV or UAV alone. Although these applications are recently studied in many different ways and devices, there are still a lot of possibilities in the field of air-ground cooperating robot systems. We introduce those research fields in this paper.