Traversable Region Modeling for Outdoor Navigation

  • Authors:

  • Cristina Castejón;Beatriz L. Boada;Dolores Blanco;Luis Moreno

  • Affiliations:

  • Mechanical Department, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain;Mechanical Department, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain;System Engineering and Automation Department, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain;System Engineering and Automation Department, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This article presents a new methodology to build, in real-time, compact local and global maps for outdoor navigation. The environment information is obtained from a 3D laser range. The navigation model, called Traversable Regions Model (TRM), is based on Voronoi diagram technique but adapted to large outdoor environments, that is, the model is built from 3D data. In the manuscript we also present a novel contribution to the regions modeling field in robotics. The method allows to calculate the roughness degree of an unknown terrain based on the normal vector deviation. The parameter which measure the roughness degree is called spherical variance and it will be useful to determine the traversable areas. The model built allows defining safe trajectories depending on the robot's capabilities and the terrain properties and will represent, in a topo-geometric way, the environment as local and global maps. The methodology presented is validated in real outdoor environments with an outdoor robot developed in our lab, called $$\mathcal{G}\mathcal{O}\mathcal{L}\mathcal{I}\mathcal{A}\mathcal{T}$$ .