This paper describes a method of estimating the traversability plant parts covering path and navigating through them for mobile robots operating in plant-rich environments. Conventional rely on scene recognition methods that consider only geometric information environment. Those methods, therefore, cannot recognize paths as traversable when they are covered by flexible plants. In this paper, we...

This paper presents a complete system for autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in urban environments. An urban environment is defined as one having hard surface and comprising curbs, ramps, and obstacles. The robot is required to traverse flat ground surfaces and ramps, but avoid curbs and obstacles. The system employs a 2-D laser rangefinder for terrain mapping. In order to filter erroneous...

This research enables robot explorers to maximize the total information gained while minimizing costs such as driving, sensing and planning. This paper presents a general methodology for solving complex exploration tasks which employs multiple sources of information. The paper also develops a specific instantiation of the method to solve the exploration problem of creating a complete traversabi...

To safely navigate autonomously on unstructured terrain, a planetary rover requires the ability to: a) accurately and reliably estimate terrain traversability, and b) plan and execute safe paths to reach the desired goal. However, real-world considerations such as sensing limitations and uncertainties make these tasks particularly challenging in practice. This work proposes novel approaches to ...

This paper presents a technique for learning to assess terrain traversability for outdoor mobile robot navigation using human-embedded logic and real-time perception of terrain features extracted from image data. The methodology utilizes a fuzzy logic framework and vision algorithms for analysis of the terrain. The terrain assessment and learning methodology is tested and validated with a set o...