Air-Ground Robotic Ensembles for Cooperative Applications: Concepts and Preliminary Results Alberto Elfes, Marcel Bergerman, José Reginaldo Hughes Carvalho, Ely Carneiro de Paiva, Josué Jr. Guimarães Ramos, Samuel Siqueira Bueno Automation Institute Informatics Technology Center Campinas SP Brazil 13083-970 marcel @ ia.cti.br Abstract This article discusses the components of an envisioned air-ground robotic ensemble, composed of one or more aerial vehicles working cooperatively with one or more ground robots. Our proof-of-concept system is composed of an unmanned airship and a mobile robot. We report on the current project status, including preliminary results on a software environment for airship modeling and control and a mathematical morphology-based ground robot navigation method. 1 Introduction Robotic collectives composed of properly selected and coordinated heterogeneous robots will greatly extend the capability of human beings to perform complex tasks. It is clear that the range of tasks that can be performed by an heterogeneous robotic collective is far greater than the addition of the possible tasks each robot can execute independently. In particular, cooperative inspection and handling applications can benefit from a partition of responsibilities, where one of the robots provides broad visual coverage and perception, and another robot executes close-up inspection and manipulation. Air-ground robotic ensembles specifically are of substantial interest for a large class of field applications, including hazardous material inspection and handling, demining, environmental and agricultural research and monitoring, and surveillance tasks [15]. The authors are working on the development of an air-ground robotic ensemble aimed at environmental, biodiversity and agricultural applications (Figure 1). For these type of missions, airships have been shown to be a better choice over airplanes and helicopters [3], [8], [13], [14], [22]. Our proof-of-concept system consists of an AS800 airship and a XR4000 mobile robot (Figure 2). In this article we report the current development status of this system, which include a distributed software environment for the unmanned airship, airship modeling and control methods, and a mathematical morphology-based trajectory planner for the ground robot that uses aerial images collected by the airship camera. Figure 1: Air-ground robotic environmental monitoring concept. communication link aerial vehicle g round aerial ima g e robot Figure 2: Proof-of-concept robotic ensemble.