Topological large-scale off-road navigation and exploration RAVON at the European Land Robot Trial 2008

Abstract

Abstract-A large-scale navigation system for autonomous off-road robots is presented which uses a topological map to navigate to a previously unseen target location. During path traversal, the system relies on a local navigation layer to avoid obstacles not modeled in the map. Data from this local layer is abstracted to learn both realistic topological edge cost measures and local traversability maps which allow more efficient route selection during topological exploration. On the topological level, a technique to handle impassable route segments in the map is presented and an exploration strategy that allows to discover new routes to the goal is introduced. The performance of the proposed concept is experimentally validated on the robot RAVON at the 2nd Military European Land Robot Trial 2008.

Cost-Efficient Global Robot Navigation in Rugged Off-Road Terrain

“…Tests in competitive scenarios [2] validate the claim that the new, hybrid metrical/topological map structure indeed allows to perform cost-conscious path planning. At the same time, the robot does not need to construct a detailed metrical world model to reason about traversability costs.…”

A study on key technologies of unmanned driving

“…The military themes included reconnaissance and surveillance, autonomous navigation, fleet transport and so on while civil scenes included safety, fire protection, and disaster control and so on. In the later tests, the autonomous cars and its task completion advanced year after year [8]. ELROB has played an active part in promoting the research of unmanned driving technologies in Europe [9].…”

Off-road Robotics—An Overview

“…Competitions like the DARPA Grand Challenge 1 [100] or the European Robot Trial (ELROB 2 ) [16,25,42,56,57,61,91] have demonstrated the state of research in off-road robotics as well as the capabilities of various approaches and vehicles. Recently, the Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) project [52] of the DARPA has fostered the scientific progress in off-road robotics.…”