A LIDAR filtering technique is used to differentiate on-terrain points and off-terrain points from a cloud of 3-D point data collected by a LIDAR system. A major issue of concern in this low-level filter is to design a methodology to have a continual adaptation to terrain surface variations. To this end, several essential observations are discussed in this paper: i) the terrain surface can be f...

This paper reports a methodology for inferring terrain parameters from estimated terrain forces in order to allow wheeled autonomous vehicles to assess mobility in real-time. Terrain force estimation can be used to infer the ability to accelerate, climb, or tow a load independent of the underlying terrain model. When a terrain model is available, physical soil properties and stress distribution...

Determination of terrain data features in a high resolution terrain data model are required in a large variety of applications where visualization is an important aspect. This is a complex problem because a terrain model is generally a mapping of the reality into a continuous 3D surface model of arbitrary shape, requiring an extremely large amount of data especially when a high resolution is re...

This paper introduces a new approach for determining the most likely initiation points for landslides from potential instability mapped using a terrain stability model. This approach identifies the location with critical stability index from a terrain stability model on each downslope path from ridge to valley. Any measure of terrain stability may be used with this approach, which here is illus...

Current approaches to local rough-terrain navigation are 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 surface and the location of obstacles. This is especially true in domains where vegetation may hide the ground surface or partially obscure obstacles. This thesis pre...

1. Introduction Many of the recent conflicts where the United States (US) military forces have been deployed are regions that contain complex terrain (i.e. Korea, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq). Accurate weather forecasts are critical to the success of operations in these regions and are typically supplied by numerical weather prediction (NWP) models like the US Navy NOGAPS, CAOMPS, an...

Mesh-based terrain representations provide accurate descriptions of a terrain, but fail in capturing its morphological structure. The morphology of a terrain is defined by its critical points and by the critical lines joining them, which form a so-called surface network. Because of the large size of current terrain data sets, a multi-resolution representation of the terrain morphology is crucia...

Contact mechanics plays an important role in the design, performance analysis, simulation, and control of legged robots. The Hunt–Crossley model and the Coulomb friction model are often used as black-box models with limited consideration of the properties of the terrain and the feet. This paper analyzes the foot–terrain interaction based on the knowledge of terramechanics and reveals the relati...

The terrain acquisition problem deals with the acquisition of the complete obstacle terrain model by a mobile robot placed in an unexplored terrain. This is a precursory problem to many well-known find-path and related problems which assume the availability of the complete terrain model. In this paper, we present a method for terrain acquisition by a finitesized robot operating in plane populat...