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Case File2012

UAV-UGV Hybrid with Air-Based Path Planning

NYU Abu Dhabi · Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML)

Heterogeneous symbiotic robot pair treated as one entity with separable bodies: the ground vehicle carries and recharges a lightweight quad-rotor, while the quad-rotor acts as the pair's detachable long-range vision system, turning top-down aerial views into the maps that plan the ground vehicle's route.

System Record

Application
Environment
Period
2012

My Contribution

First-author development of the UAV–UGV hybrid pilot: aerial mapping into ground-robot path planning, published at FIT 2012.

Development & Validation

  • Aerial frames are stitched into a single overhead map, obstacles are segmented from it, and a slowness map yields a collision-free minimum-time trajectory for the ground robot.
  • Built as a small-scale indoor pilot standing in for a much larger outdoor system, which made the concept testable and iterable at low cost and risk.
  • First-author paper at the 10th International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology; still cited in later aerial terrain mapping work for ground robot navigation.

Credits & Collaborators

  • Nikolaos Mavridis

    Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML)

    Principal Investigator

  • Jong Hyun Bak

    IRML

    Co-author

  • Juan V. Gómez

    IRML

    Co-author

  • A. Llenga

    IRML

    Co-author

Evidence

Connected Work