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The continuous monitoring by drone swarms remains a challenging problem dueto the lack of power supply and the inability of drones to land on unevensurfaces. Heterogeneous swarms, including ground and aerial vehicles, cansupport longer inspections and carry a higher number of sensors on board.However, their capabilities are limited by the mobility of wheeled and leggedrobots in a cluttered environment.  In this paper, we propose a novel concept for autonomous inspection that wecall SwarmGear. SwarmGear utilizes a heterogeneous swarm that investigates theenvironment in a leader-follower formation. The leader drone is able to land onrough terrain and traverse it by four compliant robotic legs, possessing boththe functionalities of an aerial and mobile robot. To preserve the formation ofthe swarm during its motion, virtual impedance links were developed between theleader and the follower drones.  We evaluated experimentally the accuracy of the hybrid leader drone's groundlocomotion. By changing the step parameters, the optimal step configuration wasfound. Two types of gaits were evaluated. The experiments revealed lowcrosstrack error (mean of 2 cm and max of 4.8 cm) and the ability of the leaderdrone to move with a 190 mm step length and a 3 degree standard yaw deviation.Four types of drone formations were considered. The best formation was used forexperiments with SwarmGear, and it showed low overall crosstrack error for theswarm (mean 7.9 cm for the type 1 gait and 5.1 cm for the type 2 gait).  The proposed system can potentially improve the performance of autonomousswarms in cluttered and unstructured environments by allowing all agents of theswarm to switch between aerial and ground formations to overcome variousobstacles and perform missions over a large area.

SwarmGear: Heterogeneous Swarm of Drones with Reconfigurable Leader Drone and Virtual Impedance Links for Multi-Robot Inspection