Stealth Navigation: Planning and Behaviors

Stealth navigation is a fundamental capability for a scout vehicle to e ectively perform reconnaissance missions. One component of stealth is the ability to plan paths that minimize visibility of the vehicle from target locations. This paper demonstrates a stealth planning system using visibility analysis on digital terrain elevation maps for path planning. Goal locations can be user speci ed or automatically constructed at the visibility boundary for RSTA operations. The second component of our stealth navigation system is the ability to control a vehicle to minimize exposure during RSTA operations in the presence of sensor measurement error, inaccurate terrain maps or a dynamic environment. The notion of visual stealth behavior, i.e. visual servoing to acquire and maintain a stealth position or trajectory is introduced as a mechanism for robust stealth navigation. Matching and tracking terrain features in the image space are identi ed as important pre-requisites for visual stealth behaviors. A method is described to track an important terrain feature in imagespace namely, horizon curves.