Design of a heterogeneous marsupial robotic system composed of an USV and an UAV

This paper provides both the core ideas of a heterogeneous marsupial robotic System and the details of the practical aspects related to its hardware architecture and cooperative system structure. This heterogeneous marsupial robotic system is composed by an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that acts as a carrier and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that acts as a passenger, and it is designed for military tasks and other tasks like environmental monitoring, wild life tracking, and search & rescue missions. Through the combination, the cooperative marsupial robots benefit from their heterogeneity by using the superiority of each team member and overcoming their limitations. Moreover, the attitude control simulation model of the UAV is built, and the self-adaptive fuzzy parameter tuning rules for PID flight controller are given, so as to realize the online self-tuning of the controller parameters. Simulation results show that: compared with the conventional PID controller, this attitude control algorithm of fuzzy self-adaptive PID has a better dynamic response performance.