Stochastic approaches to mobility prediction, path planning and motion control for ground vehicles in uncertain environments

The ability of autonomous or semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to rapidly and accurately predict terrain negotiability, generate efficient paths online and have effective motion control is a critical requirement for their safety and use in unstructured environments. Most techniques and algorithms for performing these functions, however, assume precise knowledge of vehicle and/or environmental (i.e. terrain) properties. In practical applications, significant uncertainties are associated with the estimation of the vehicle and/or terrain parameters, and these uncertainties must be considered while performing the above tasks. Here, computationally inexpensive methods based on the polynomial chaos approach are studied that consider imprecise knowledge of vehicle and/or terrain parameters while analyzing UGV dynamics and mobility, evaluating safe, traceable paths to be followed and controlling the vehicle motion. Conventional Monte Carlo methods, that are relatively more computationally expensive, are also briefly studied and used as a reference for evaluating the computational efficiency and accuracy of results from the polynomial chaos-based techniques.