Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 4372: Traversability Assessment and Trajectory Planning of Unmanned Ground Vehicles with Suspension Systems on Rough Terrain

Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 4372: Traversability Assessment and Trajectory Planning of Unmanned Ground Vehicles with Suspension Systems on Rough Terrain Sensors doi: 10.3390/s19204372 Authors: Kai Zhang Yi Yang Mengyin Fu Meiling Wang This paper presents a traversability assessment method and a trajectory planning method. They are key features for the navigation of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) in a non-planar environment. In this work, a 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor is used to obtain the geometric information about a rough terrain surface. For a given SE(2) pose of the vehicle and a specific vehicle model, the SE(3) pose of the vehicle is estimated based on LiDAR points, and then a traversability is computed. The traversability tells the vehicle the effects of its interaction with the rough terrain. Note that the traversability is computed on demand during trajectory planning, so there is not any explicit terrain discretization. The proposed trajectory planner finds an initial path through the non-holonomic A*, which is a modified form of the conventional A* planner. A path is a sequence of poses without timestamps. Then, the initial path is optimized in terms of the traversability, using the method of Lagrange multipliers. The optimization accounts for the model of the vehicle’s suspension system. Therefore, the optimized trajectory is dynamically feasible, and the trajectory tracking error is small. The proposed methods were test...
Source: Sensors - Category: Biotechnology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research