Integrating terrain maps into a reactive navigation strategy

This paper presents a new method for integrating terrain maps into a reactive navigation strategy of field mobile robots operating on rough terrain. The method incorporates the Regional Traversability Map, a fuzzy map representation of traversal difficulty of the regional terrain, into the navigation logic. A map-based regional navigation behavior provides speed and direction recommendations based on the current status of the robot. In addition, recommendations from two sensor-based reactive behaviors, local avoid-obstacle and regional traverse-terrain, are fused with the map-based regional behavior to construct a comprehensive navigation system. The algorithms are tested both in graphical simulations and in the field using a commercial Pioneer 2AT robot to demonstrate traversal over rough natural terrain.