On Collaborative Aerial and Surface Robots for Environmental Monitoring of Water Bodies

Remote monitoring is an essential task to help maintaining Earth ecosystems. A notorious example is the monitoring of riverine environments. The solution purposed in this paper is to use an electric boat (ASV Autonomous Surface Vehicle) operating in symbiosis with a quadrotor (UAV – Unmanned Air Vehicle). We present the architecture and solutions adopted and at the same time compare it with other examples of collaborative robotics systems, in what we expected could be used as a survey for other persons doing collaborative robotics systems. The architecture here purposed will exploit the symbiotic partnership between both robots by covering the perception, navigation, coordination, and integration aspects.