Collaborative Unmanned Air and Ground Vehicle Perception for Scene Understanding, Planning and GPS-denied Localization

Autonomous robot missions in unknown environments are challenging. In many cases, the systems involved are unable to use a priori information about the scene (e.g. road maps). This is especially true in disaster response scenarios, where existing maps are now out of date. Areas without GPS are another concern, especially when the involved systems are tasked with navigating a path planned by a remote base station. Scene understanding via robots' perception data (e.g. images) can greatly assist in overcoming these challenges. This dissertation makes three contributions that help overcome these challenges, where there is a focus on the application of autonomously searching for radiation sources with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) in unknown and unstructured environments. The three main contributions of this dissertation are: (1) An approach to overcome the challenges associated with simultaneously trying to understand 2D and 3D information about the environment. (2) Algorithms and experiments involving scene understanding for real-world autonomous search tasks. The experiments involve a UAV and a UGV searching for potentially hazardous sources of radiation is an unknown environment. (3) An approach to the registration of a UGV in areas without GPS using 2D image data and 3D data, where localization is performed in an overhead map generated from imagery captured in the air.