The issue for the validation of land surface remote sensing albedo products over rugged terrain is the scale effects between the reference albedo measurements and coarse scale albedo products, which is caused by the complex topography. This paper illustrates a multi-scale validation strategy specified for coarse scale albedo validation over rugged terrain. A Mountain-Radiation-Transfer-based (M...

Future planetary exploration missions will require rovers to traverse very rough terrain with limited human supervision. Wheel-terrain interaction plays a critical role in rough-terrain mobility. In this paper an on-line estimation method that identifies key terrain parameters using on-board rover sensors is presented. These parameters can be used for accurate traversability prediction or in a ...

We present an approach for turn around behavior generation and execution for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operating in a rugged terrain. The generated behavior allows the vehicle to rapidly execute N-point turn maneuver in a narrow space by exploiting the vehicle’s dynamics as well as the properties of the terrain. The developed approach incorporates model-predictive planning and optimizati...

The motions of wheeled mobile robots are largely governed by contact forces between the wheels and the terrain. Inasmuch as future wheel-terrain interactions are unpredictable and unobservable, high performance autonomous vehicles must ultimately learn the terrain by feel and extrapolate, just as humans do. We present an approach to the automatic calibration of dynamic models of arbitrary wheel...

The real time three-dimensional terrain visualization is associated to several characteristics, such as the video board exhibition. Moreover, the representation of a virtual scene is carried out through compositions of triangles that together confer a three-dimensional aspect to the scene. The available details in this scene are directly related to the number of triangles amount used in its rep...

Terrain parameters derived from digital elevation models (DEMs), such as slope gradient, aspect and cell surface area, are represented as a vector normal to the surface and calculated using the minimum areal unit of the DEM, that is enclosed between four data points. The position of the Sun is calculated by applying rotational matrices to a unit vector defined at noon as a function of latitude ...

Current approaches to off-road autonomous navigation are often limited by their ability to build a terrain model from sensor data. Available sensors make very indirect measurements of quantities of interest such as the supporting ground height and the location of obstacles, especially in domains where vegetation may hide the ground surface or partially obscure obstacles. A generative, probabili...

Relief shading is the most common type of cartographic relief representation for print and digital maps. Manual relief shading results in informative and visually pleasing representations of terrain, but it is time consuming and expensive to produce. Current analytical relief shading can be created quickly, but the resulting maps are not as aesthetically appealing and do not show landscape feat...

Digital elevation models can represent many types of geographic data. One of the common digital elevation models is the triangulated irregular network (also called TIN, or polyhedral terrain, or triangulated terrain). We discuss ways to represent a TIN in a data structure, and give some of the basic algorithms that work on TINs. These include retrieving contour lines, computing perspective view...

[1] We model the spatial distribution of snow depth across a wind-dominated alpine basin using a geostatistical approach with a complex variable mean. Snow depth surveys were conducted at maximum accumulation from 1997 through 2003 in the 2.3 km Green Lakes Valley watershed in Colorado. We model snow depth as a random function that can be decomposed into a deterministic trend and a stochastic r...