An Autonomous Air-Ground Cooperative Field Surveillance System with Quadrotor UAV and Unmanned ATV Robots

In this paper we present a cooperative system for field surveillance. The system consists of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned all-terrain vehicle (U-ATV). UAV and U-ATV are equipped with a variety of sensors and mission processors so they can collect external environmental information and respond to dynamic environment independently. In addition, UAV and U-ATV are remotely monitored and operated by the ground station system. The proposed unmanned cooperative system can applied to field patrol and surveillance missions, including such as fire detection, environmental protection, enemy reconnaissance, target tracking and so on. In order to complete field surveillance mission the system leverages open source and off-the-shelf technologies. Finally an air-ground cooperative experiment has been performed in this paper.