Registration of Range Data from Unmanned Aerial and Ground Vehicles

In the research reported in this paper, we propose to overcome the unavailability of Global Positioning System (GPS) using combined information obtained from a scanning LADAR rangefinder on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a LADAR mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that flies over the terrain being traversed. The approach to estimate and update the position of the UGV involves registering range data from the two LADARs using a combination of a feature-based registration method and a modified version of the wellknown Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. Registration of range data thus guarantees an estimate of the vehicle’s position even when only one of the vehicles has GPS information. Additionally, such registration ove