Aerial and Ground Robots Networked with the Environment

This paper presents a system for the cooperation of aerial and ground robots net-worked with other objects, including the nodes of wireless sensor networks, in out-door environments. The system allows the centralized or distributed execution of missions. The robot team can provide transport, communication relay and localiza-tion services to other robots (or sensor nodes) during the mission. The distributed allocation of services and tasks to the robots has been implemented using a market based approach. The paper presents one experiment with a team of heterogeneous robots (aerial and ground) cooperating with objects in a mission of re detection and extinguishing. Key words: robot teams, aerial robots, cooperating objects, wireless communication, distributed task allocation