Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Werger, Barry.
Modular exploratory robotic vehicles that will be able to reconfigure themselves in the field are undergoing development. Proposed for use in exploration of the surfaces of Mars and other remote planets, these vehicles and others of similar design could also be useful for exploring hostile terrain on Earth.
An improved method of processing information for autonomous navigation of a robotic vehicle across rough terrain involves the integration of terrain maps into a reactive navigation strategy. Somewhat more precisely, the method involves the incorporation, into navigation logic, of data equivalent to regional traversability maps. The terrain characteristic is mapped using a fuzzy-logic representation of the difficulty of traversing the terrain. The method is robust in that it integrates a global path-planning strategy with sensor-based regional and local navigation strategies to ensure a high probability of success in reaching a destination and avoiding obstacles along the way. The sensor-based strategies use cameras aboard the vehicle to observe the regional terrain, defined as the area of the terrain that covers the immediate vicinity near the vehicle to a specified distance a few meters away.
A document presents an updated discussion on a method of autonomous navigation for a robotic vehicle navigating across rough terrain. The method involves, among other things, the use of a measure of traversability, denoted the fuzzy traversability index, which embodies the information about the slope and roughness of terrain obtained from analysis of images acquired by cameras mounted on the robot. The improvements presented in the report focus on the use of the fuzzy traversability index to generate a traversability map and a grid map for planning the safest path for the robot. Once grid traversability values have been computed, they are utilized for rejecting unsafe path segments and for computing a traversalcost function for ranking candidate paths, selected by a search algorithm, from a specified initial position to a specified final position. The output of the algorithm is a set of waypoints designating a path having a minimal-traversal cost.