In remote sensed data, topographic corrections are very important to overcome the topographic effects such as shadow effects. These topographic effects occurs especially in case of rugged terrain because sun facing slope represents maximum reflectance values and opposite side slope represents minimum reflectance values. These topographic effects leads to an inaccurate classification into differ...

The intention of this paper is twofold. It first describes the robotic platform AloF and its control software framework which was designed for autonomous locomotion in rough terrain. The robot has a very large range of leg motion to actively explore its surroundings through haptic interaction and to increase its locomotion capabilities. The platform is robust enough to carry adequate sensors to...

The Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search at Carnegie Mellon is developing robotic technologies to allow for autonomous search and classification of meteorites in Antarctica. In November 1998, the robot Nomad was deployed in the Patriot Hills region of Antarctica to perform several demonstrations and experiments of these technologies in a polar environment. Nomad drove 10.3km autonomously in Antar...

Interpreting laser data to allow autonomous robot navigation on paved as well as dirt roads using a fixed angle 2D laser scanner is a daunting task. This paper introduces an algorithm for terrain classification that fuses seven distinctly different classifiers: raw height, roughness, step size, curvature, slope, width and invalid data. These are then used to extract road borders, traversable te...

Transmission of large terrain databases across the Internet is still worrying. A large terrain database requires a big number of polygons and textures, and that represents a problem with current bandwidth and resource limitations. Multiresolution models permit progressive transmission, that is the transmission of a simple model followed by successive refinements. In this work we present a new m...

It is necessary for autonomous ground vehicles operating on outdoor terrains to identify and adapt to different terrains in order to improve their mobility and safety. This work presents a classification scheme to identify outdoor terrains and an update rule to reduce the possibility of implementing control modes based on classification inaccuracies. A laser stripe-based structured light sensor...