Realization of an autonomous team of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles

Abstract

The paper presents work that has been done by three different research institutions. The aim was to realize an autonomous team of heterogeneous unmanned ground and aerial vehicles performing certain reconnaissance and surveillance tasks, where the tasks were set by an operator at a team level instead of controlling each vehicle seperately. To overcome the lack of a common middleware, the interfaces between vehicles and graphical user interface have been defined using Robot Operating System (ROS) and Battle Management Language (BML). We present approaches for autonomous control of the vehicles, focussing on the unmanned ground vehicle. Moreover, we conducted some large field experiments and present the results. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.