A method for mobile robot navigation on rough terrain

Abstract

This paper presents a new obstacle negotiation method for mobile robot navigation on rough terrain. The proposed method first transforms a local terrain map surrounding the robot's momentary position into a grid-type traversability map by extracting the slope and roughness of a terrain patch through least-squares plane-fitting. It then computes so-called "polar obstacle densities" for the cells in the traversability map and transforms the traversability map into a traversability field histogram, from which the velocity and the steering command for the robot are determined. Simulation results show that the algorithm is able to navigate the robot to the target with a finite-length path.