Virtual Surfaces and Attitude Aware Planning and Behaviours for Negative Obstacle Navigation
This addresses the problem of navigating complex, unseen terrain for ground robots, particularly in subterranean settings, and is incremental as it builds on existing components with explicit coupling.
The paper tackles autonomous navigation for ground robots in aggressive unstructured terrain by integrating mapping, planning, and reactive behaviors that account for terrain slope, visibility, and vehicle orientation, enabling robots to handle negative obstacles and other hazards; results from deployment in DARPA Subterranean Challenge environments and simulations demonstrate the system's effectiveness.
This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of terrain slope, visibility and vehicle orientation, enabling robots to recognize, plan and react around unobserved areas and overcome negative obstacles, slopes, steps, overhangs and narrow passageways. This is one of pioneer works to explicitly and simultaneously couple mapping, planning and reactive components in dealing with negative obstacles. The system was deployed on three heterogeneous ground robots for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, and we present results in Urban and Cave environments, along with simulated scenarios, that demonstrate this approach.