Research Project AVANZA TSI-020100-2010-970 (2010-2012)
Robot HÃbrido UGV/UAV de Ultra-Alta Movilidad
This project aims at designing a new concept of mobile hybrid robot UGV-UAV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) that allows for substantially increasing the degree of mobility in today’s robots. Soil properties impose severe restrictions on the mobility of robots (mobility in the broadest sense refers to the performance of the robot in relat on to the field, ability to negotiate obstacles and avoid them, ability to overcome rough terrain and crossing streams.)
The combination of two locomotion systems in a single hybrid system will allow the speed, controllability and autonomy of a land mobile platform, adding the mobility of a system capable of flying. The project aims to develop the associated technologies (stability control, attendance control, software and control architectures, HRI interfaces, navigation systems and assistance through Artificial Vision) to develop a new type of robot to be applied in multiple scenarios.
One of the main features of this robot will be the capacity of simultaneously map its environment and locate itself in it, with Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, in order to assist the teleoperation, allowing detect and avoidiobstacles easily, like in the above example video. For this task, we will use a Microsoft Kinect device as a RGBD sensor (wiki), that will provide us RGB images (as any conventional camera) and also a sparse matrix with the depth corresponding to the pixels from the RGB camera, like any TOF camera but with a lower cost. All this will be also reinforced with the use of a GPS in order to help the robot localization in the environment.
All the robot software system will be integrated on the Willow Garage’s ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, a modular open-source platform that provides hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, among other features.