Cooperative Audio-Visual System for Localizing Small Aerial Robots

Employing small size aerial robots, acting as mobile airborne sensors, to work alongside ground robots can be extremely useful in many different robotic missions. Due to the strict constraints in terms of size, weight, 3D coverage, processing power and power consumption. There are not many technological possibilities for performing independent self-localization for such tiny robots. This paper describes a cooperative audio-visual localization system to robustly estimate the position of a small aerial robot from a ground robot. Experimental results with a 40-gram quadrotor assess the performance of the system and demonstrate the reliability gained through fusion of sound measurements with visual information.