Virtual Surfaces and Attitude Aware Planning and Behaviours for Negative Obstacle Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous ground robot navigation system that integrates mapping, planning, and reactive behaviors to effectively traverse complex, unstructured terrains with negative obstacles, demonstrated in DARPA challenge environments.

Contribution

It is one of the first systems to explicitly couple mapping, planning, and reactive components for negative obstacle navigation in unstructured terrains.

Findings

Successful deployment on three heterogeneous robots.

Effective navigation in urban and cave environments.

Demonstrated robustness in simulated scenarios.

Abstract

This paper presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of terrain slope, visibility and vehicle orientation, enabling robots to recognize, plan and react around unobserved areas and overcome negative obstacles, slopes, steps, overhangs and narrow passageways. This is one of pioneer works to explicitly and simultaneously couple mapping, planning and reactive components in dealing with negative obstacles. The system was deployed on three heterogeneous ground robots for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, and we present results in Urban and Cave environments, along with simulated scenarios, that demonstrate this approach.