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Updated: Feb 14, 2026

A Spine Robotic-Assisted Navigation System for Pedicle Screw Placement
Published on: May 11, 2020
Online Aerial Terrain Mapping for Ground Robot Navigation
John Peterson1, Haseeb Chaudhry2, Karim Abdelatty3
1Virginia Tech Unmanned Systems Laboratory, Blacksburg, VA 24060, USA. jrpeter@vt.edu.
Abstract:
This work presents a collaborative unmanned aerial and ground vehicle system which utilizes the aerial vehicle's overhead view to inform the ground vehicle's path planning in real time. The aerial vehicle acquires imagery which is assembled into a orthomosaic and then classified. These terrain classes are used to estimate relative navigation costs for the ground vehicle so energy-efficient paths may be generated and then executed. The two vehicles are registered in a common coordinate frame using a real-time kinematic global positioning system (RTK GPS) and all image processing is performed onboard the unmanned aerial vehicle, which minimizes the data exchanged between the vehicles. This paper describes the architecture of the system and quantifies the registration errors between the vehicles.
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