A Composite Metric Routing Approach for Energy-Efficient Shortest Path Planning on Natural Terrains

This paper explores the problem of energy-efficient shortest path planning on off-road, natural, real-life terrain for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). We present a greedy algorithm based composite metric routing approach that combines energy consumption and distance path. In our work, we consider Terramechanics between UGV soil to account wheel sinkage effect, in addition slope deformation limitations development algorithm. As benchmarks comparison, use recent energy-cost minimization approach, an ant colony optimization (ACO) implementation. Our results indicate proposed outperforms state-of-the-art method terms resulting distance, with negligible increase consumption. Moreover, also strongly ACO implementation quality paths obtained running time. fact, time indicates its suitability large natural graphs thousands nodes tens links.