An explicit path planner to facilitate reactive control and terrain preferences

This paper presents a new approach to reactive control utilizing the output of an explicit path planner which considers terrain preferences. To demonstrate the concept, a wavefront propagation, type of planner algorithm, Trulla, is integrated into a reactive framework and used as part of the overall architecture. Terrain preferences are represented as weights or costs which are considered in generating a near optimal path. The algorithm is demonstrated on the CSM Denning-Branch MRV4 mobile robot for three scenarios: navigation out of a box canyon, planning with terrain preferences, and opportunistic path improvement