An Analysis of Requirements for Rough Terrain Autonomous Mobility
Alonzo Kelly, Anthony Stentz · 1999
. A basic requirement of autonomous vehicles is that of guaranteeing the safety of the vehicle by avoiding hazardous situations. This paper analyses this requirement in general terms of real-time response, throughput, and the resolution and accuracy of sensors and computations. Several nondimensional expressions emerge which characterize requirements in canonical form. The automatic generation of dense geometric models for autonomously navigating vehicles is a computationally expensive process. Using first principles, it is possible to quantify the relationship between the raw throughput required of the perception system and the maximum safely achievable speed of the vehicle. We show that terrain mapping perception is of polynomial complexity in the response distance. To the degree that geometric perception consumes time, it also degrades real-time response characteristics. Given this relationship, several strategies of adaptive geometric perception arise which are practical for autono...