Marsupial Walking-and-Flying Robotic Deployment for Collaborative Exploration (IROS 2022)

Submitted to the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022) Marsupial Walking-and-Flying Robotic Deployment for Collaborative Exploration of Unknown Environments Paolo De Petris, Mihir Dharmadhikari, Huan Nguyen, Nikhil Khedekar, Kostas Alexis are with the Autonomous Robots Lab, NTNU, Norway. Shehryar Khattak, Gabriel Waibel, Markus Montenegro, Marco Hutter are with the Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Abstract: This work contributes a marsupial robotic system- of-systems involving a legged and an aerial robot capable of collaborative mapping and exploration path planning that exploits the heterogeneous properties of the two systems and the ability to selectively deploy the aerial system from the ground robot. Exploiting the dexterous locomotion capabilities and long endurance of quadruped robots, the marsupial combination can explore within large-scale and confined environments involving rough terra