Mobility Erosion: High speed motion safety for mobile robots operating in off-road terrain

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of ensuring mobile robot motion safety when reacting to soft and hard hazards in a static environment. The work is aimed at off-road navigation for mobile ground robots where soft hazards are posed by varying terrain conditions (e.g. deformable soil, slopes, vegetation). Soft hazards pose operating constraints (i.e. speed limits) to the mobile robot that need to be satisfied to ensure motion safety. This paper presents a new morphological erosion operator that generalizes binary obstacle growing to mobility space (the space of speed limits) to deal with both hard and soft hazards seamlessly. This ensures that topological constraints due to vehicle size as well as momentum are taken into account, and leads to a straight-forward approach to generalize the concept of `regions of inevitable collision' for soft hazards.