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arXiv · 2608.07797

Drone-Assisted UAV-UGV Collaboration for Autonomous Navigation in Snow-Covered Terrain

Shreyam Gupta·P. Agrawal·Priyam Gupta·R. Gautam
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Abstract

This paper presents a collaborative UAV-UGV navigation framework for high-altitude, snow-covered terrain, where reduced visibility and unstable ground render conventional methods ineffective. We introduce a custom efficient U-Net architecture that falls under the computational constraints for real-time road segmentation, utilizing a novel synthetic snow data augmentation technique to achieve 96.5% segmentation accuracy. For UAV localization, we implement an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) fusing onboard GPS and IMU data, achieving a maximum observed positional error of +-0.5 meters. The UGV position is determined via a visual tracking pipeline using YOLOv5 and depth data from the UAV's RGB-D camera. A dynamic path planning algorithm utilizes this segmentation to adjust for snow drifts, enabling successful navigation in obscured test environment with minimal deviation.

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Shreyam Gupta, P. Agrawal, Priyam Gupta, R. Gautam. 2026-08-07. Drone-Assisted UAV-UGV Collaboration for Autonomous Navigation in Snow-Covered Terrain. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.07797

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