Rough Terrain Autonomous Mobility-Part 2: An Active Vision, Predictive Control Approach

Off-road autonomous navigation is one of the most difficult automation challenges from the point of view of constraints on mobility, speed of motion, lack of environmental structure, density of hazards, and typical lack of prior information. This paper describes an autonomous navigation software system for outdoor vehicles which includes perception, mapping, obstacle detection and avoidance, and goal seeking. It has been used on several vehicle testbeds including autonomous HMMWV’s and planetary rover prototypes. To date, it has achieved speeds of 15 km/hr and excursions of 15 km. We introduce algorithms for optimal processing and computational stabilization of range imagery for terrain mapping purposes. We formulate the problem of trajectory generation as one of predictive control searching trajectories expressed in command space. We also formulate the problem of goal arbitration in local autonomous mobility as an optimal control problem. We emphasize the modeling of vehicles in sta...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: AROBOTS
• Authors: Alonzo Kelly, Anthony Stentz
• Keywords: AROBOTS 1998, Autonomous, Control Layer, Predictive Control