Tactical Autonomous Maneuver Testbed for Multi-Agent Air-Ground Teams
Landon Stauffer, Pratheek Manjunath, Dongbin Kim, Christopher Korpela · 2023
We present a testbed for multi-agent teams through the integration of small unmanned aerial systems with small autonomous ground vehicles. Using the Quanser Autonomous Research Studio, Quanser's QDrone, and QCar, we set up an environment where researchers can run behavior models to observe the interaction between aerial and ground systems. The testbed strives to be agnostic of the programming language and lower-level autonomy so that the higher-level interactions can be studied more effectively. For the purposes of this indoor testbed, we found that both internal positioning systems and external reference systems (motion capture cameras) are required for maintaining accurate pose odometry and collecting ground-truth data. Based on the observed and collected data on the QDrone and QCar, this study aims to develop the capabilities of ground/aerial autonomous system integration, while creating a basic testbed that can serve additional research on these topics.