A novel navigation method, optimal for sloped terrain

Terrain with large areas of inclines is very common for mobile robot. Although sloped terrain has special property, available research does not pay special attention to slopes, which leads to less efficiency, weak adaptability and low operability in such environments. On the other hand, people usually have their own values and simply use their own experience to deal with slopes in their daily life which suggests an approach to robot navigation problem in sloped terrain. In this paper, we present a navigation method that consists of a formula for computing the directional-dependent cost related to slopes and a path planning algorithm for grid maps with slope cost. This paper also provides several experimental results in line with human values including zigzag paths and spiral paths.