Behaviour-based Motion Control for Offroad Navigation

Many tasks examined for robotic application like rescue missions or humanitarian demining require a robotic vehicle to navigate in unstructured natural terrain. This paper introduces a motion control for a four-wheeled offroad vehicle trying to tackle the problems arising. These include rough ground, steep slopes, wheel slippage, skidding and others that are difficult to grasp with a physical model and often impossible to aquire with sensoric equipment. Therefore a more reactive approach is choosen using a behaviour-based architecture. This way a certain generalisation in unknowned environment is expected. The resulting behaviour network is described and initial experiments performed in a simulations environment are presented.