Cooperative System with UAV and UGV for Disaster Area Exploration

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) are expected to be widely active in exploring disaster area. However, each unmanned vehicle has problems such as short flight time or poor efficiency of the exploration. As a solution of these problems, a cooperative system between these vehicles is useful by compensating disadvantages each other. In this paper, we propose the cooperation system using quadrotor UAVs and a UGV. In the system, the potential function method that can flexibly cope with a change of environment without computational complexity is used to avoid obstacles and reach the desired position. UAVs transmit data of obstacles to a UGV so as to explore a disaster area efficiently. Super-twisting sliding mode observer (STSMO) is treated for estimating velocities of the vehicles to avoid deterioration of control performance. The validity of the proposed control system is verified through numerical simulations.