Vision-based teleoperation of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

We present a novel vision-based teleoperation control framework for a team of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Our control law allows a remote human user to teleoperate the team with some useful haptic feedback, while also ensuring the UAV-UGV coordination via the camera installed on the UAV (and seeing the UGV) and the velocity limitation of the UGV. For this, we first elucidate a geometric condition for the UAV and UGV velocities to ensure the UAV-UGV coordination by driving the image feature of the UGV to converge to a desired one on the image surface, while also guaranteeing that the UGV´s velocity, which is often much slower than that of the UAV, is under a certain specified bound. The UAV is then tele-controlled to track the teleoperation command as close as possible, yet, only to the extent permissible by this geometric condition. Simulation is performed to illustrate the theory.