Enhancing sensor capabilities of walking robots through cooperative exploration with aerial robots

Mobile robots can be used to support humans in many applications ranging from simple process automation to complex autonomous inspection tasks. While walking robots are perfectly suited to cross rough terrain, they are not able to detect everything in their environment as certain areas might be occluded or too far away. This paper presents a method of enhancing the sensor capabili- ties of the walking robot LAURON IVc with the use of the lightweight aerial robot ARDrone. A simple method for localization of the ready to use UAV is presented using only color tags and the motor encoders of LAURON. The combination of these two robot types enhances the sensor range of LAURON greatly, while the ARDrone gains localiza tion information from LAURON that acts as a base station.