Teaming of an UGV with a VTOL-UAV in urban environments

This paper focuses on the teaming of a small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) with an unmanned micro serial vehicle (MAV) in order to improve the navigation solution of the UGV e. g. in the case of GPS loss. The image data that is acquired by the on-board camera of the MAV is processed in order to detect the UGV marked by a colored pattern. After the identification of the UGVpsilas location in an image, the location of the UGV with respect to a geo-coordinate system and its yaw angle are estimated by taking the MAVpsilas position and attitude into account. Finally, this information is processed in the system on-board the UGV to improve the navigation solution. The performances of the particular parts of the setup and also of the whole system are illustrated with experimental data.