Towards Reliable Aerial Ground Vehicle Collaboration: An Integrated Planning and Autonomy Framework for Field Deployment

Md Safwan Mondal, Luca Russo, James D. Humann, James M. Dotterweich, Pranav Bhounsule

Limited flight endurance significantly restricts the operational range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in long duration missions such as surveillance and inspection, where multiple spatially distributed Areas of Interest (AOIs) must be visited. These tasks require efficient routing determining the sequence of visits which directly impacts mission time, energy consumption, and overall feasibility. Pairing UAVs with unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) for mobile recharging offers a promising solution, but introduces a tightly coupled cooperative routing problem involving UAV route planning, UGV road constrained movement, energy management, and rendezvous scheduling under uncertainty. In this work, we present an integrated planning and autonomy framework for reliable field deployment. We formulate the problem as an energy constrained cooperative routing task and solve it using a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based planner that jointly optimizes the UAV visitation sequence and rendezvous locations with the UGV, outperforming baseline heuristics in minimizing total mission time. To bridge the gap between planning and execution, we introduce a standardized two layer YAML based mission API that captures environment states and structures lightweight, synchronized action sequences. This framework is supported by a complete autonomy stack using PX4/MAVSDK for UAV control and ROS 2/Nav2 for UGV navigation. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight Rendezvous Aware Replanner (RARP) that operates online to handle environmental uncertainties, reducing energy margin violations from 83.33% to 20.00%. The full system is validated through outdoor field experiments, demonstrating robust cooperative navigation and adaptability in dynamic tasks, including a search and rescue scenario with vision language model (VLM) based hazard detection