Increasing Perception Space of a Ground Standing Robot via Data Transmission from an Aerial Robot

In this paper, an approach to increase perception space of a ground standing robot via data transmission from an aerial robot is presented. Since the collected point cloud data from two robots have different coordinates, a rigid registration based approach is applied to align the coordinate of the aerial robot’s perception space to the ground robot’s one. First, the static markers which are attached to the base position of the ground robot are used to compute the transformation. However, they did not work properly when the markers are accidentally invisible due to its kinematic limits. To solve the issue, the dynamic markers which are attached to both fixed (base) and movable links of the ground robot are also studied. To account for kinematic changes of dynamic markers, forward kinematics of the ground robot’s limb is iteratively updated and applied to the rigid transformation computation. The both approaches were tested and evaluated through experiments with a full-sized armed robot and a drone in a mock-up of task field.