Cooperative Aerial-Ground Vehicle Rendezvous with Integrated Obstacle Avoidance

This work addresses the integration of simultaneous obstacle avoidance for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) operating cooperatively to rendezvous at a predefined location. A distributed consensus-based architecture is proposed to guide the vehicles toward their designated rendezvous point. Additionally, a virtual force-based obstacle avoidance method is employed for both vehicles. A comparison is conducted with an existing control approach from the literature extended to incorporate obstacle avoidance. Simulation results are provided showing the ability of the presented controllers to achieve rendezvous while simultaneously avoiding obstacles.