A Method For Mobile Robot Obstacle Negotiation

This paper presents an obstacle negotiation method for mobile robot navigation. The proposed method first transforms a local terrain map surrounding the robot’s momentary position into a grid-type traversability map by extracting the slope and roughness of a terrain patch through least-squares plane-fitting. It then evaluates the overall traversal property along each direction. The traversal information is used to form a traversability field histogram, from which the steering and velocity commands for the robot are determined. The new concept of motion-context is proposed and used to guide the robot in such a way that the algorithm converges to the target with a finite-length path.