Development of Volcano Observation System That Consists of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Tele-operated Unmanned Ground Vehicle

—Field Experiment of Tele-operated Robots in Mt. Asama in 2014—

Abstract

An observation in active volcano areas is very important to work out a strategy for estimation of eruptive activity and evacuation call to residents. However, it is a too dangerous task for human to observe in such areas. Therefore, we developed a tele-operated robotic observation system instead of human. In the system, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) carries a small-sized Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) in a target point autonomously, and UGV observes the target area tele-operatively. To confirm our developing system, we performed field experiments in Mt. Asama, Japan. In this paper, we report the results and the lessons learned from the experiments.