Mobility planning for omni-directional vehicles in natural terrains

Abstract

Planning paths for onmi-directional vehicles (ODVs) can be computationally unfeasible because of the large space of possible paths. This paper presents an approach that avoids this problem through the use of abstraction in characterizing the possible maneuvers of the ODV as a grammar of parameterized mobility behaviors and describing the terrain as a covering of objectoriented functional terrain features. The terrain features contain knowledge on how best to create mobility paths—sequences of mobility behaviors—through the object and around obstacles. Given an approximate map of the environment, the approach constructs a graph of mobility paths that link the location of the vehicle with the goals. Which of these paths are actually followed by the vehicle are determined by an A* search through the graph. The effectiveness of the strategy is demonstrated in actual tests with a real robotic vehicle.