Information-based intelligent unmanned ground vehicle navigation

Sensor-centric navigation of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) operating in rugged and expansive terrains requires the competency to evaluate the utility of sensor information such that it results in intelligent behavior of the vehicles. In this paper, we propose an entropic information metric for the above purpose where entropy is used to quantify the probabilistic uncertainty in sensor measurements. We present results using data obtained from field trials on an unmanned vehicle to substantiate the utility of the proposed metric. We also show how low and high level tasks can be predicated upon this metric in potential application areas related to autonomous vehicle navigation.