A practical motion planner for all-terrain mobile robots

The authors address the motion planning problem for wheeled vehicles moving on rough terrains. First, they formalize the placement problem for the case of a rather complex locomotion system consisting of n wheels attached to the robot body by passive suspensions. They next analyze the geometric and kinematic constraints acting on the placements of the robot. Finally, they present a planning method that computes a safe and feasible path between two given placements of the robot. The approach basically consists in searching a path into a graph built incrementally during the exploration of a discrete 3-D configuration space. The algorithms have been implemented, and simulation results are reported