In the context of robotic path planning, a common strategy is to assume that the world is static and believed on heuristic approaches and obstacle avoidance to deal with changes in the environment. When planning is not considered for potential changes of the environment into account usually leads to poor performances. In this paper, we propose a hybrid ACO-PSO approach that exploits the travers...

This paper presents an global-optimal motion planner for Mars Rover. It accounts for traversability and dynamic stability due to vehicle dynamics and terrain topography. A given path is traversable if along it the vehicle is statically stable. The vehicle is dynamically stable if its velocity does not exceed the velocity limit, determined from tip-over, sliding, and contact constraints. The cos...

The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project aims to create a robot capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. The robot finds its way by interacting with pedestrians and building a topological representation of its surroundings. This paper outlines the necessary ingredients for successful low-level navigation on sidewalks, information ret...

Future planetary exploration missions will require rovers to perform difficult tasks in rough terrain, with limited human supervision. Knowledge of terrain physical characteristics would allow a rover to adapt its control and planning strategies to maximize its effectiveness. This paper describes recent and current work at MIT in the area of terrain estimation and sensing. A method for on-line ...

A stereo-based terrain classification for traversability estimation of all terrains in offroad mobile robots is presented. The proposed method defines the roughness of the surrounding terrain for every single pixel in the image or point in a point cloud using surface normals and also explains how this is applied to all terrain by knowing the kinematics capability, mechanical constraints and siz...

The concept of a line digraph is generalized to that of a directed path graph. The directed path graph → Pk(D) of a digraph D is obtained by representing the directed paths on k vertices of D by vertices. Two vertices are joined by an arc whenever the corresponding directed paths in D form a directed path on k + 1 vertices or form a directed cycle on k vertices in D. Several properties of → P3(...

Autonomous planetary rovers operating in vast unknown environments must operate efficiently because of size, power and computing limitations. Recently, we have developed a rover capable of efficient obstacle avoidance and path planning. The rover uses binocular stereo vision to sense potentially cluttered outdoor environments. Navigation is performed by a combination of several modules that eac...

Suppose, the Universe comes into existence (as classical spacetime) already with an empty spherically symmetric macroscopic wormhole present in it. Classically the wormhole would evolve into a part of the Schwarzschild space and thus would not allow any signal to traverse it. I consider semiclassical corrections to that picture and build a model of an evaporating wormhole. The model is based on...

For autonomous driving, traversability analysis is one of the most basic and essential tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel LiDAR-based terrain modeling approach, which could output stable, complete accurate models results. As an inherent property environment that does not change with different view angles, our approach adopts multi-frame information fusion strategy for modeling. Specifical...