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Abstract : |
In this paper, we describe a core system for autonomous navigation in outdoor natural terrain. The system consists of three parts: a perception module which processes range images to identify untraversable regions of the terrain, a local map management module which maintains a representation of the environment in the vicinity of the vehicle, and a planning module which issues commands to the vehicle controller. Our approach is to use the concept of "early traversability evaluation, " in which the perception module decides which parts of the terrain are traversable as soon as a new image is taken, and on the use of a behavior-based architecture for generating commands to drive the vehicle. We argue that our approach leads to a robust and efficient navigation system. We illustrate our approach by an experiment in which a vehicle travelled autonomously for one kilometer through unmapped cross-country terrain. The system used in this experiment can be viewed as a core navigation system in that other modules, such as a map navigation module, can be easily added to the system., |
