Behavior maps for online planning of obstacle negotiation and climbing on rough terrain

Christian Dornhege, Alexander Kleiner
2007 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems  
To autonomously navigate on rough terrain is a challenging problem for mobile robots, requiring the ability to decide whether parts of the environment can be traversed or have to be bypassed, which is commonly known as Obstacle Negotiation (ON). In this paper, we introduce a planning framework that extends ON to the general case, where different types of terrain classes directly map to specific robot skills, such as climbing stairs and ramps. This extension is based on a new concept called
more » ... ior maps, which is utilized for the planning and execution of complex skills. Behavior maps are directly generated from elevation maps, i.e. two-dimensional grids storing in each cell the corresponding height of the terrain surface, and a set of skill descriptions. Results from extensive experiments are presented, showing that the method enables the robot to explore successfully rough terrain in real-time, while selecting the optimal trajectory in terms of costs for navigation and skill execution.
doi:10.1109/iros.2007.4399107 dblp:conf/iros/DornhegeK07a fatcat:fagbwtj6k5bwxcubnz422754jy