Reactive Navigation in Outdoor Environments Using Potential Fields

The paper presents an approach to reactive navigation in cross-country terrains. The approach relies on a particular probabilistic obstacle detection procedure, that describes the area perceived by a pair of stereo cameras as a set of polygonal cells. To generate the motion commands on the basis of this terrain description, we present some improvements and adaptations to the classical potential fields technique. Results on real stereo data illustrate our contribution throughout the paper, and simulated long range traverses are discussed.