Traversability metrics for rough terrain applied to repeatable test methods

Rough terrain, such as the rubble that one would expect to find in urban disaster areas, poses a severe impediment to robot mobility. The goal of this paper' is to develop methods for quantifying the difficulty a robot would encounter traversing such a region of rough terrain. Towards this, thr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Molino, V., Madhavan, R., Messina, E., Downs, A., Balakirsky, S., Jacoff, A.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Impedance
Intelligent robots
Mobile robots
NIST
Orbital robotics
Path planning
Robot motion
System testing
USA Councils
Online Access:Request full text
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Summary:Rough terrain, such as the rubble that one would expect to find in urban disaster areas, poses a severe impediment to robot mobility. The goal of this paper' is to develop methods for quantifying the difficulty a robot would encounter traversing such a region of rough terrain. Towards this, three traversability metrics describing rough terrain robot mobility are developed. In order to simplify the problem, we assume that the rough terrain in question can be discretized in a certain manner and then develop the metrics for this discretized version of the terrain. Two of the developed metrics reflect the difficulty a robot would have trying to move over the entire region of terrain (referred to as coverability). The third metric, referred to as crossability, describes the difficulty a robot would encounter attempting to move from some fixed point on the terrain to some other fixed point. We verify the applicability of the developed metrics using NIST-developed repeatable test methods (step fields) and discuss the validity of the obtained results.
ISSN:2153-0858
2153-0866
DOI:10.1109/IROS.2007.4399438