Path Planning Considering Energy Consumption of Crawler Robots in Mountain Environments
Namihei ADACHI, Hisashi DATE · 2024
In the forestry industry, the demand for task automation is increasing to solve the labor shortage problem. We examine the path planning problem for tasks such as afforestation, harvesting, and surveying, in which a robot travels a predetermined set of locations. We specifically address the problem of path planning for minimization of energy consumption for the operation of a crawler robot in an environment with slopes. This problem requires consideration of the energy loss caused by ascending and descending in the mountainous environment, besides the energy loss due to friction during on-the-spot rotation specific to the crawler robot, and is impossible to treat as the standard Traveling Salesman Problem(TSP). We apply the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) known as the TSP extension to this problem. This allows the proposed method to account for energy consumption during movement. We modeled the energy consumption of the robot during straight movements and rotations through a preliminary experiment. A graph reflecting the energy consumption model can be generated for evaluation of the path planning by setting the points to be traversed on the point cloud map after 3D scanning of an outdoor unstructured terrain field with flat ground and sloped ground. It is confirmed that the proposed method can plan a path that reduces energy consumption by 22% for a standard TSP solution that quasi-minimizes Euclidean distance.