Development of a Traversability Map for Safe Navigation of Autonomous Mobile Robots
Gang-Gyoo Jin · Journal of Institute of Control Robotics and Systems · 2014
This paper presents a method for developing a TM (Traversability Map) from a DTM (Digital Terrain Model) collected by remote sensors of autonomous mobile robots. Such a map can be used to plan traversable paths and estimate navigation speed quantitatively in real time for robots capable of performing autonomous tasks over rough terrain environments. The proposed method consists of three parts: a DTM partition module which divides the DTM into equally spaced patches, a terrain information module which extracts the slope and roughness of the partitioned patches using the curve fitting and the fractal-based triangular prism method, and a traversability analysis module which assesses traversability incorporating with extracted terrain information and fuzzy inference to construct a TM. The potential of the proposed method is validated via simulation works over a set of fractal DTMs.