Teleoperated visual inspection and surveillance with unmanned ground and aerial vehicles

This paper introduces our robotic system named UGAV (Unmanned Ground-Air Vehicle) consisting of two semi-autonomous robot platforms, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The paper focuses on three topics of the inspection with the combined UGV and UAV: (A) teleoperated control by means of cell or smart phones with a new concept of automatic configuration of the smart phone based on a RKIXML description of the vehicle control capabilities, (B) the camera and vision system with the focus to real time feature extraction e.g. for the tracking of the UAV and (C) the architecture and hardware of the UAV.