For Autonomous Ground Vehicles, modelling of the terrain is important for predicting future behaviours and control options. Current terrain modelling is able to identify geometric hazards but has a limited ability to identify complex terrain characteristics. This paper presents a method for segmenting and classifying terrain types based on range data to establish a geometric model of the terrai...

This paper brings forward a Digital Earth-based DEM server model – TON (Terrain On the INTERNET). TON takes client/server architecture and closely integrates with WWW server. The server side of TON builds multiresolution terrain database in a quadtree structure, which offers an effective method to retrieve terrain data. The client side of TON integrates with WWW browser as a component, which su...

This paper presents the advanced sonar sensor model capable of building an underwater terrain map based on the Bayes filter in the manner of the occupancy grid. The proposed sonar sensor model basically considers the losses of received ultrasound intensity according to the underwater absorption and reflection on a terrain surface. The Bayes filter including the advanced sonar sensor model is ap...

Large terrain databases require a great number of polygons and textures. In consequence, transmission of terrain data over slow networks is still worrying. Multiresolution models allow progressive transmission, that is, the transmission of a simple model followed by successive refinements. In this work we describe a new multiresolution model called Geometric-Textured Bitree (GTB) that enables p...

Modeling the environment is an essential capability for autonomous robots. To navigate and manipulate without direct human control, autonomous robots must sense the environment, model the environment, and plan and execute actions based on information from the model. Perceiving and mapping rugged terrain from multiple sensor data is an important problem for autonomous navigation and manipulation...

A key issue facing any ROV or AUV-based benthic visual survey is how to point the camera normal to the terrain during the survey. Though planar terrain surveys can be executed using a constant camera orientation, non-planar terrain surveys require that the commanded camera orientation change during vehicle movement.. This paper proposes a method that generates a smooth camera orientation comman...

Future robotic vehicles will perform challenging tasks in rough terrain, such as planetary exploration and military missions. Rovers with actively articulated suspensions can improve rough-terrain mobility by repositioning their center of mass. This paper presents a method to control actively articulated suspensions to enhance rover tipover stability. A stability metric is defined using a quasi...

Conventional nonholonomic motion planning and control theories do not incorporate the effects of uncertain terrain. This paper discusses some basic issues of motion planning and control for kinematic vehicles on uncertain terrain. We extend proofs of local stabilizability for time varying feedback laws to vehicles on uncertain terrain by showing that terrain can be modeled as parametric uncerta...

Abstrac t . A two-stage approach is discussed for reconstructing a dense digital elevation model (DEM) of the terrain from multiple pre-calibrated images taken by distinct cameras at different time under various illumination. First, the terrain DEM and orthoimage are obtained by independent voxel-based reconstruction of the terrain points using simple relations between the corresponding image g...

In this work we propose two problems that related to a theoretical mobility model previously proposed by Greenlaw and Kantabutra and add some definitions to make the model more complete. The first problem is the minimum time maximum coverage (MTMC) problem to minimize time to move a group of sources which covered a terrain to cover another terrain while all sources can still communicate through...