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A Review of Collaborative Air-Ground Robots Research

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Abstract

The collaboration of heterogeneous robots is a hot topic in multi-intelligent agents, characterized by wide-area coverage and high environmental adaptability. Compared with a single-intelligent agent, multi-intelligent agent collaboration presents superior data matching, system redundancy, and robustness. At the same time, the complementarity of heterogeneous multi-robot is formed a cross-domain, which inherently improves its perception capability, execution capability, and operational efficiency in the complex environment. Therefore, multi-intelligent agents’ organic coordination and cross-domain collaboration will lead to a new paradigm of future robotics and applications. This paper reviews air-ground collaboration, the Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) collaborative system as the research targets. Firstly, the essential elements of UGVs and UAVs are introduced. Secondly, the types of equipment, sensors, missions, environments, metrics under heterogeneous robotic platforms, and how to make device selections in which tasks and scenarios are classified. Thirdly, several vital roles in the air-ground collaborative systems are identified. Finally, a multi-level classification of air-ground collaboration in funded projects, competitions, unique scenarios, inspirations, platforms, and challenges is discussed.

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Funding

This project is supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No.51965008); Major Science and Technology Projects of Guizhou Province. ZNWLQC [2019]3012; Major Science and Technology Projects of Guizhou Province. [2022]045; Foundation of Postgraduate of Guizhou Province, Grant/Award Number: YJSKYJJ (2021) 025.

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  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Guizhou University, Huaxi District, Guiyang, 550025, Guizhou province, China

    Chang Liu, Jin Zhao & Nianyi Sun

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  1. Chang Liu
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Contributions

Conceptualization, C.L. and J.Z.; Methodology, C.L.; Validation, C.L. and N.S.; Investigation, C.L. and N.S.; Resources, C.L.; Data curation, C.L., N.S.; Writing—Original draft preparation, C.L.; Writing—Review and Editing, C.L. and J.Z.; Supervision, J.Z.; Project administration, J.Z.; Funding acquisition, J.Z. and C.L.

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Correspondence to Jin Zhao.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 10 Some funded projects for multi-robot collaboration. The utilization of different robots; whether a heterogeneous multi-robot system was used; and how the data were processed. The application refers to the experimental testing scenarios, but not necessarily to the characterization of all systems
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Appendix 2

Table 11 Some competitions for multi-robot collaboration. We describe: the utilization of different types of robots whether a heterogeneous multi-robot system is used; how the data is processed and the form of robot control. The application scenarios are restricted to the competition test scenarios
Full size table

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Liu, C., Zhao, J. & Sun, N. A Review of Collaborative Air-Ground Robots Research. J Intell Robot Syst 106, 60 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01756-4

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