Toward Wheeled Mobility on Vertically Challenging Terrain: Platforms, Datasets, and Algorithms

TL;DR

This paper introduces new wheeled platforms, datasets, and algorithms to enhance robot mobility over vertically challenging terrain, addressing limitations of conventional flat-environment robots.

Contribution

It presents minimally modified wheeled platforms, new datasets of challenging terrains, and algorithms demonstrating improved mobility in rugged environments.

Findings

Algorithms enable traversal of challenging terrains

Datasets facilitate data-driven mobility research

Platforms are publicly available for further development

Abstract

Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world, extremely rugged, off-road environments, where part of the terrain (e.g., irregular boulders and fallen trees) will be treated as non-traversable obstacles. To improve wheeled mobility in those environments with vertically challenging terrain, we present two wheeled platforms with little hardware modification compared to conventional wheeled robots; we collect datasets of our wheeled robots crawling over previously non-traversable, vertically challenging terrain to facilitate data-driven mobility; we also present algorithms and their experimental results to show that conventional wheeled robots have previously unrealized potential of moving through vertically challenging terrain. We make our platforms, datasets, and algorithms publicly available to facilitate future research on wheeled mobility.