We develop a localization method for a single-UAV/multi-UGV heterogeneous system of robots. Considering the natural supervisory role of the UAV and the challenging (but realistic) assumption that the UAV-to-UGV measurements do not include the identities of the UGVs, we have adopted the PHD filter as a multi-target tracking technique. However, the standard version of this filter does not take into account odometric information coming from the targets, nor does it solve the problem of estimating their identities. Hence, we design ID-PHD, a modification of the PHD filter that is able to reconstruct the identities of the targets by incorporating odometric data. The proposed localization method has been successfully validated through experiments. Some preliminary results of a localization-based control scheme for the multi-robot system are also presented. © 2013 IEEE

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Abstract-We propose a cooperative control scheme for a heterogeneous multi-robot system, consisting of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with a camera and multiple identical Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). Our control scheme takes advantage of the different capabilities of the robots. Since the system is highly redundant, the execution of multiple different tasks is possible. The primary task is aimed at keeping the UGVs well inside the camera field of view, so as to allow our localization system to reconstruct the identity and relative pose of each UGV with respect to the UAV. Additional tasks include formation control, navigation and obstacle avoidance. We thoroughly discuss the feasibility of each task, proving convergence when possible. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed method.

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