One common and desirable application of robots is exploring potentially hazardous and unstructured environments. Air-ground collaboration offers a synergistic approach to addressing such exploration challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate a system for large-scale exploration using a team of aerial and ground robots. Our system uses semantics as lingua franca, and relies on fully opportunistic communications. We highlight the unique challenges from this approach, explain our system architecture and showcase lessons learned during our experiments. All our code is open-source, encouraging researchers to use it and build upon.
@article{arxiv.2405.07169,
title = {Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics},
author = {Fernando Cladera and Ian D. Miller and Zachary Ravichandran and Varun Murali and Jason Hughes and M. Ani Hsieh and C. J. Taylor and Vijay Kumar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.07169},
year = {2024}
}