Motion Planning of Autonomous Off-Road Vehicles under Physical Interaction Constraints

| We describe in this paper a new motion planning approach for a non-holonomic mobile robot moving on a uneven terrain and subject to strong physical interaction constraints. The novelty of this method is that it deals with the dynamics of the robot and its physical interactions with the terrain at the planning time, together with the kinematic and the geometric constraints of the task. The planner basically combines a geometry based reasoning strategy operating on a subset of the connguration space of the robot, and a local continuous motion generation technique based on the use of a physical model of the task. We will describe each level and its corresponding models, and present how they are integrated in order to nd safe and executable motions for a rover. Contribution of the paper | The contribution of this paper is a two-level approach for planning the motions of autonomous vehicles moving on a given hill-like and hostile terrain. The purpose of this work is to propose a planning method which combines geometric and physical models of the task in order to nd safe and executable motions for the vehicle. The basic idea consists in performing two complementary levels: the rst level is based on a geometry based technique allowing to determine a set of intermediate safe and stable conngurations of the robot, while the second level, computes an executable motion using the dynamic model of the robot and appropriate physical models of the terrain and of the wheels/ground interactions. The method has been implemented and applied on a six-wheeled vehicle moving on a three dimensional terrain. The potential application of the method is the motion planning of autonomous robots moving in a physically constrained environment such as planetary rovers and oo-road vehicles. Abstract We describe in this paper a new motion planning approach for a non-holonomic mobile robot moving on an uneven terrain and subject to strong physical interaction constraints. The novelty of this method is that it deals with the dynamics of the robot and its physical interactions with the terrain at the planning time, together with the kinematic and the geometric constraints of the task. The planner basically combines a geometry based reasoning strategy operating on a subset of the connguration space of the robot, and a local continuous motion generation technique based on the use of a physical model of the task. We will describe each level …