Design and Analysis of a Novel Concept-Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Ground Traversing Capability

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a typical aircraft that is operated remotely by a human operator or autonomously by an on-board microcontroller. The UAV typically carries offensive ordnance, target designators, sensors or electronic transmitters designed for one or more applications. Such application can be in the field of defence surveillance, border patrol, search, bomb disposals, logistics and so forth. These UAVs are also being used in some other areas, such as medical purposes including for medicine delivery, rescue operations, agricultural applications and so on. However, these UAVs can only fly in the sky, and they cannot travel on the ground for other applications. Therefore, in this paper, we design and present the novel concept-based UAV, which can also travel on the ground and rough terrain as an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). This means that according to our requirement, we can use this as a quadcopter and caterpillar wheel–based UGV using a single remote control unit. Further, the current study also briefly discusses the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) SolidWorks models of the novel concept-based combined vehicle (UAV + UGV), together with a physical model of a combined vehicle (UAV + UGV) and its various components. Moreover, the kinematic analysis of a combined vehicle (UAV + UGV) has been studied, and the motion controlling kinematic equations have been derived. Then, the real-time aerial and ground motions and orientations and control-based experimental results of a combined vehicle (UAV + UGV) are presented to demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed vehicle.