The use of unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs is growing rapidly across many applications such as surveillance, package delivery, infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring. Many companies are starting to consider the use of drones in their day-to-day business. For instance, Amazon recently announces that its new delivery drone will start shipping packages within a few months.
The main problem with drones, however, is the fact that they don’t have long battery life and need to be recharged quite often. Most small, medium-sized UAVs have battery life shorter than 30 minutes which prevents them from being used for long-running missions that need extended flight time or distance.
Even though battery life will certainly increase as technology advances, we believe that this problem can be solved by utilizing an unmanned ground vehicle or a UGV to serve as a mobile charging platform. The UAV can land on the service UGV, which allows for the charging of the batteries. In this project, we present an autonomous navigating, docking and recharging drone system consists of a UAV and a UGV.