Robust motion planning for rough terrain navigation

Deals with motion planning for a mobile robot on rough terrain. Hait and Simeon (1996) proposed a geometrical planner for articulated robots which can take into account uncertainty of the terrain and of the position of the robot. This paper aims at improving the robustness of the trajectory using a landmark based approach. We consider regions of the terrain where natural landmarks are visible. We propose a two-step planning approach taking advantage of these regions to reduce position uncertainty. First a path is determined between the initial and goal configurations, based on simplified models of the constraints. Then a trajectory is planned along this path, verifying the validity and visibility constraints