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This paper presents a comprehensive wheel model that can quantitatively evaluate traction performance of flexible/rigid wheels driving on deformable terrain. The proposed model exploits a terramechanics-based approach with taking account of pressures generated by wheel elasticity as well as terrain stiffness. Deflection of a flexible wheel typically depends on a relative pressure between the wh...

Nowadays geographic vector data is produced both by public and private institutions using well defined specifications or crowdsourcing via Web 2.0 mapping portals. As a result, multiple representations of the same real world objects exist, without any links between these different representations. This becomes an issue when integration, updates, or multi-level analysis needs to be performed, as...

A stereo vision based terrain traversability estimation method for offroad mobile robots is presented. The method models surrounding terrain using either sloped planes or a digital elevation model, based on the availability of suitable input data. This combination of two surface modeling techniques increases range and information content of the resulting terrain map.

A path from s to t on a polyhedral terrain is descending if the height of a point p never increases while we move p along the path from s to t. No efficient algorithm is known to find a shortest descending path from s to t in a polyhedral terrain. We give some properties of such paths. In the case where the face sequence is specified, we show that the shortest descending path is unique, and giv...