Recently, Li Jun, the professor from the school of vehicle and transportation of Tsinghua University and the academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, with his team successfully developed the first generation of Tsinghua lion unmanned air-ground vehicle. It is all called a rotor-type air-ground intelligent vehicle, which is the first pure electric rotor-type unmanned flying vehicle integrating intelligent driving function in the world.
Based on the spatial fusion perception system, this vehicle realizes the new driving mode of air-ground combination, independent planning, and free switching through technologies such as spatial perception field, spatial compound planning, smooth switching between land and air, etc.
The vehicle uses the traditional four-wheel and two-wheel drive chassis as the basic structure of ground driving and realizes the flight action with a high degree of freedom to use the rotor. The vehicle realizes the combination of rotor and wheel chassis. Compared with the unmanned vehicle on the ground, it has higher dimensional motion capability and better flexibility; Compared with the traditional unmanned aerial vehicle, it has realized the increase of effective cruising range.
This vehicle is equipped with autonomous decision-making ability of unmanned driving. The environment perception system equipped with the unmanned air-ground flying vehicle is the same as that of an unmanned vehicle, which has autonomous decision-making ability without human control; Compared with point-to-point path, this rotor-type unmanned air-ground flying vehicle can carry out three-dimensional path planning and can realize functions such as vertical takeoff and landing, space planning, hovering in the air, flight obstacle avoidance, ground cruise, following the vehicle, etc. During the driving process of the vehicle, the vehicle will build the spatial driving perception model in real-time and judge the type of obstacle. Aiming at the obstacle which cannot be bypassed, the vehicle will start the flight mode, fly over the obstacle, and look for the driving area, then it will land on the flat ground which can be driven in the path, realizing the efficient and free switching of air and land amphibians and improving the transportation efficiency.
Senior engineer Zhang Xinyu from vehicle and transportation school of Tsinghua University, Tan Qifan postdoctor, and Liu Huaping, associate professor of computer department, worked together to carry out vehicle structure design and motion control design aiming at new intelligent flying vehicles, research on the design of perception system and system integration, and conducted flight experiment verification aiming at urban pavement environment and field complex terrain in Gu ‘an branch of Hebei Tsinghua Development Research Institute and Yanqing mountain area for many times respectively.
Experts pointed out that under the overall framework of smart city intelligent transportation intelligent vehicles, the deep integration of intelligent vehicles and three-dimensional transportation is the inevitable trend of smart cities. The land-air amphibious autonomous driving speed can be applied to the fields of goods transportation, rescue, travel and so on, and will eventually be integrated into the overall architecture of intelligent transportation intelligent vehicle based on intelligent city.