Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (MSME)

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Sun Yi

Abstract

This thesis presents development of a feedback controller for a cooperative mission using unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned ground vehicle. This developed controller offers a solution to the time delayed collaborative autonomous systems for multiple robot systems. There are many motivating applications for these missions including exploration, search and rescue in damaged areas. The architecture developed in this thesis consists of an unmanned ground vehicle as a leader and an unmanned aerial vehicle as a follower. To be specific, the unmanned ground vehicle navigates through a damaged environment and leads the mission. The unmanned aerial vehicle follows the leader and provides enhanced situation awareness through higher view. The proposed architecture has been developed using an image processing algorithm, where the bottom camera of the unmanned aerial vehicle track and keep a fixed distance from a fiducial marker placed on the top of an unmanned ground vehicle. The proposed work has been done using Parrot 2.0 AR Drone and Kuboki TurtleBot 2. The developed controller is validated through implementations on real robots and comparing these experimentations to the simulations, which shows that the developed controller has satisfactory results and acceptable performance in mitigating time delay in such systems. Several open source packages have been used in this project after alterations to fit the work of this thesis.

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