Adaptive Traversability Analysis and Behavior Generation Method for Mobile Robots on Rough Terrain

This paper describes a novel rough terrain traversability analysis and behavior generation method for mobile robot navigation. We focused on the scenario of mobile robot operation in complex environment such as disaster sites. The proposed method enables mobile robots to analyze terrain traversability of surrounding area and select safe course direction. According to the selected course direction, appropriate control input is calculated and mobile robot moves following the calculated control input. Terrain traversability analysis and course direction judgment are realized based on feature value calculation of terrain, fuzzy inference and vector field histogram. Mobile robot’s behavior generation is realized based on control method which takes advantage of reference posture tracking. The experimental results show that the proposed method can navigate mobile robot successfully to the target location in complex environment including terrain area.