Design and Implementation of an Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicle Recharging System

The use of Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) is becoming increasingly popular due to a variety of applications such as security, delivery, search, and recovery. The limited battery capacity of the UAVs becomes one of the most crucial problems which calls for a solution of automatic recharging and battery optimization to extend the UAVs’ operation time. This paper provides the design and implementation of a UAGVR (Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicle Recharging) system which allows the UAV to receive on-demand wireless recharging from an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). An object tracking camera on the UGV allows it to automatically maneuver towards the UAV to accept an autonomous landing and recharging. We present a cooperative mission planning algorithm for the UAGVR system. A proof of concept system is developed using a small ground vehicle and a miniature quadcopter. Experimental results confirm the validity of our system design and suggest future work.