Collaborative Coordination and Control for an Implemented Heterogeneous Swarm of UAVs and UGVs

Over the last few years, cooperative autonomous systems have become a more popular solution for accomplishing tasks that are otherwise performed by human operators. Several strides have been made with homogeneous systems of vehicles in areas of localization, formation behaviors, path planning, task allocation, and vehicle controls. This paper describes both work completed and the future goals in the Machine Intelligence Lab (MIL) on the development of a heterogeneous system of platforms consisting of unmanned ground vehicles (UGS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that cooperatively work together to accomplish tasks such as search and rescue in an outdoor environment. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is used between and within each vehicle to handle cooperative high level planning and task allocation, as well as control each vehicle’s individual capabilities, specializing in identification or classification. High level planning between vehicles includes formation behaviors, heterogeneous path planning and task allocation, and basic levels of localization. A description of the system and a planned implementation in a practical testing environment is also given.