Multi-sensory motion estimation and control of a mini-quadrotor in an air-ground multi-robot system

An air-ground multi-robot system is designed for the purpose of applying bio-inspired sensor-motor modeling on technical systems. It consists of a flying mini-quadrotor equipped with inertial and visual sensors, and a wheeled minirobot equipped with active markers. The system modules, a multi-sensory pose/motion estimation approach and a closed-loop control of the flying quadrotor are described in this paper. The quadrotor can hover over the ground robot stably and track the ground robot movement. An accurate pose estimation is verified by a comparison between the estimated quadrotor pose and the actual pose during the flight.

I. INTRODUCTION

We design a heterogeneous multi-robot system, containing a mini-quadrotor and a wheeled mini-robot (see Fig. 1). In this system an accurate 3D pose/motion estimation using multiple sensors is developed and a multi-rate control approach is implemented to enable the quadrotor hovering and tracking the moving ground robot. This testbed can be used to exploit control strategies of a 3D flying system, study various biologically inspired flying behaviors [1], and realize multi-agent applications. Based on [2], this paper describes our improved results of visionlIMU guided mini-quadrotor.