A behavior-based system for off-road navigation

Abstract

We describe a core system for autonomous navigation in outdoor natural terrain. The system consists of three parts: a perception module that processes range images to identify untraversable regions of the terrain, a local map management module that maintains a representation of the environment in the vicinity of the vehicle, and a planning module that issues commands to the vehicle controller. We illustrate our approach by an experiment in which a vehicle travelled autonomously for one kilometer through unmapped cross-country terrain.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>