Path Planning for an Unmanned Ground Vehicle Traversing Rough Terrain with Unknown Areas

In this paper we tackle the problem of planning a path for a ground vehicle in rough terrain, which is perceived and modelled in an imperfect way. The imperfectness, manifesting itself as unknown areas decreases the efficiency of motion planning, as the unknown terrain has to be treated as non-traversable. We demonstrate that it is possible to employ relatively simple image inpainting algorithms to substitute the missing elevation values in the terrain map, and to embed the terrain discontinuity filling procedure in an efficient path planner. We show reliable filling-in of discontinuities in various elevation maps, and then demonstrate gains in path planning efficiency due to integration between the discontinuity filling procedure and the path planner.

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