High-speed navigation of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) in rough unknown terrains requires the detection and identification of the terrain in order to make effective navigation decisions. This paper investigates a geometrical approach to identifying terrain based on its roughness using the terrain elevations from a point cloud generated using a 3D camera. This roughness, called the ...

Accurate perception is a principal challenge of autonomous off-road driving. Perceptive technologies generally focus on obstacle avoidance. However, at high speed, terrain roughness is also important to control shock the vehicle experiences. The accuracy required to detect rough terrain is significantly greater than that necessary for obstacle avoidance. We present a self-supervised machine lea...

A stereo-based terrain classification for traversability estimation of all terrains in offroad mobile robots is presented. The proposed method defines the roughness of the surrounding terrain for every single pixel in the image or point in a point cloud using surface normals and also explains how this is applied to all terrain by knowing the kinematics capability, mechanical constraints and siz...

Aiming at the problem of tourism scenic route planning, this paper studies and analyzes the combined influence of terrain slope and surface properties on vehicle route planning. The “window moving method” is introduced to carry out early slope calculation and traffic ability analysis for the terrain, roughness evaluation index is established respectively for wheeled and tracked vehicles and the...

Stochastic surface models are useful for analyzing in situ roughness profiles and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of geological terrain. In this paper, two different surface models are discussed: surfaces with a stationary random roughness (conventional model) and surfaces with a power-law roughness spectrum (fractal model). In the former case, it must be considered that for short profile...

This paper presents a rule-based Fuzzy Traversability Index that quantifies the ease-of-traversal of a terrain by a mobile robot based on real-time measurements of terrain characteristics retrieved from imagery data. These characteristics include, but are not limited to: slope, roughness, hardness, and discontinuity. The proposed representation of terrain traversability incorporates an intuitiv...

Radar interferometry is a technique which makes use of interfered signal of two radar echoes for topographic elevation and terrain element mapping. ERS Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tandem pair with minimum possible temporal baseline of 1-day and with precise orbit control to obtain suitable interferometric spatial baseline is appropriate for interferometric study in terrain analysis. In this ...

In multi-scale digital terrain analysis, the main goal is to preserve the basic ‘skeleton’ with changing scales and to deliver more consistent measurements of terrain parameters at different scales. The drainage lines serve the basic morphology features and ‘skeleton’ in a basin, and therefore play an important role for most applications. Many drainage-constrained methods for DEM generalization...

For navigation on outdoor surfaces, usually having different kind of roughness and soft irregularities, this paper proposal is that a wheeled robot combines the gradient method for path planning, alongside it adjusts velocity based on a multi-layer fuzzy neural network; the network integrates information about the roughness and the soft slopes of the terrain to compute the navigation velocity. ...