Terrain Roughness Measurement from Elevation Maps

Abstract

The Autonomous Planetary Rover Project at Carnegie Mellon University is investigating the use of geometric information obtained from terrain elevation maps for mobile robot planning and control. We review how surface geometry has been characterized by surface roughness parameters, and why several of these parameters must be combined to form a vector roughness measurement. Next we propose a technique to localize and extract the intrinsic roughness from terrain elevation maps, and show how this can be used to characterize terrain.