Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
heterogeneous robot teams
modular reconfiguration
aerial-ground platform
field operations
Fly, Drive, Reconfigure: A Modular Reconfigurable Aerial-Ground Platform for Field Operations
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenge that heterogeneous robots with fixed physical morphologies struggle to adapt to complex field tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose HARP, an air-ground collaborative platform that enables modular robots to dynamically fly and reconfigure into ground vehicles during missions through energy-aware planning and autonomous aerial mobility. This approach facilitates on-demand reconfiguration of physical capabilities and heterogeneous swarm control. Validated through field deployments in extreme environments such as the Greenland Ice Sheet, HARP demonstrates efficient sampling, transportation, and fully autonomous end-to-end mission execution. By transcending conventional constraints, this work establishes a novel paradigm for robotic operations in extreme environments.
📝 Abstract
Heterogeneous robot teams distribute complementary capabilities across specialized agents, but their physical roles and capacities typically remain fixed throughout a mission. We present HARP, a Heterogeneous Aerial Robotic modules Platform in which independently deployable aerial robots physically reconfigure to compose their capabilities for field operations. HARP comprises sensor-equipped scouts, flydrive rover modules, and task-specific payload modules. Scouts map the environment and inform an energy-aware planner that jointly selects routes and air-ground mobility modes. Rover and payload modules fly independently across terrain that constrains ground travel, then autonomously assemble into a cooperative ground vehicle for energy-efficient payload transport. Motivated by environmental sampling in remote and difficult-to-traverse regions, we evaluate HARP through field experiments spanning sensing, planning, reconfiguration, airground mobility, payload transport, and task execution. We further conduct module-level deployment tests on the Greenland Ice Sheet toward future autonomous missions. HARP demonstrates how heterogeneous robot teams can adapt not only their actions, but also how their physical capabilities are composed during a mission.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Modular Reconfigurable Robots
Aerial-Ground Mobility
Heterogeneous Robot Teams
Energy-aware Planning
Autonomous Assembly
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
