In order to maneuver autonomously on rough terrain, a mobile robot must constantly decide whether to traverse or circumnavigate terrain features ahead. This ability is called Obstacle Negotiation (ON). A critical aspect of ON is the socalled traversability analysis, which evaluates the level of difficulty associated with the traversal of the terrain. This paper presents a new method for travers...

This paper describes slope traversability analysis for a planetary exploration rover based on a terramechanics approach. In this research, the slope traversability is defined as consisting both of slope climbing and traversing (crossing) capabilities. The authors have been investigated traction mechanics between a wheel of a rover and loose soil. Applying our advantages in the wheel-soil intera...

1 Introduction This paper presents novel measures of terrain traversability at three different ranges; namely Local , Regional, and Global Traversability Indices. The Local Traversability Index is related by a set of linguistic rules to local obstacles and surface softness within a local perception range, measured by on-board sensors mounted on the robot. The rule-based Regional Traversability ...

Traversability maps are a global spatial representation of the relative difficulty in driving through a local region. These maps support simple optimisation of robot paths and have been very popular in path planning techniques. Despite the popularity of these maps, the methods for generating global traversability maps have been limited to using a-priori information. This paper explores the cons...

This paper presents an obstacle avoidance system for the Segway Robotic Mobility Platform (RMP). The system consists of four main modules: terrain mapping, terrain traversability analysis, path planning, and motion control. The main sensor in our system is a forward/downward-looking 2-D Sick laser rangefinder. The terrain mapping module registers realtime laser range data into a grid-type eleva...

This study aims at quantifying the influence on the traversability of road network of road network caused by building collapse in earthquake. To this end, an analysis method on post-earthquake traversability of road network considering building collapse is proposed. First, the time-history analysis of seismic response based on the multi-degree of freedom (MDOF) model is performed for regional b...

Interstellar travel in the Milky Way is commonly thought to be a long and dangerous enterprise, but are all galaxies so hazardous? I introduce concept of galactic traversability address this question. Stellar populations one factor traversability, with higher stellar densities velocity dispersions aiding rapid spread across galaxy. The interstellar medium (ISM) another factor, as gas, dust grai...

Robot navigation using vision is a classic example of a scene understanding problem. We describe a novel approach to estimating the traversability of an unknown environment based on modern object recognition methods. Traversability is an example of an affordance jointly determined by the environment and the physical characteristics of a robot vehicle, whose definition is clear in context. Howev...

This paper presents a new strategy for behavior-based navigation of field mobile robots on challenging terrain, using a fuzzy logic approach and a novel measure of terrain traversability. A key feature of the proposed approach is real-time assessment of terrain characteristics and incorporation of this information in the robot navigation strategy. Three terrain characteristics that strongly aff...

This paper presents a rapid traversability assessment approach based on an extended 2.5D grid-based representaion of the rough terrain. Stereo vision system is used to perceive the environment surrounding robot. Conventional 2D, 3D and other 2.5D grid maps determine the traversability indices of the grids directly from the sensor feedback, while our approach attempts to address the indices of t...