Global path planning on uneven elevation maps

This paper introduce about graph-search based global path planning on uneven elevation maps. An elevation map is an efficient and popular representation for 3-D terrains due to its easy manipulation by a computer. On the elevation map, we investigate three different optimal paths in the aspects of travel distance, travel time, and energy consumption. A distance/time-optimal path is derived by simple extension of A* on 2-D grid maps. A formulation on energy consumption leads an energy-optimal version and traversiblity criteria. We demonstrate effectiveness of our proposed method by experiments on randomly generated Gaussian hills.