LAUSR

Thelast decade has witnessed growing research interests in the path-planning problem for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with RGB-D cameras or LiDARs. However, apart from their extremely high cost, these sensors may be obscured by obstacles, which makes them impractical for many complex scenarios. Besides, most of the existing works for path planning have not considered energy efficiency for UGVs that are usually constrained by limited on-board batteries. Distinct from existing methods, this work presents a vision-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted cooperative system for multiple UGVs. The proposed system harnesses the broad vision of UAV and operates in both general outdoor and global positioning system (GPS)-denied indoor environments. In sharp contrast to the conventional heuristic algorithms such as the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm and the Dijkstra methods, the proposed energy-efficient path planning for UGVs is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem by considering the collision-aware obstacle-avoidance. More specifically, the proposed path-planning scheme contains two stages, namely the semantic segmentation that localizes UGVs and obstacles in the environment by exploiting the wide-angle camera mounted on the UAV, followed by the trajectory generation in which a disciplined convex and concave programming (DCCP) algorithm is devised for the non-convex energy-minimization problem. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the UAV-UGV cooperative system and the proposed DCCP-based path-planning scheme.