MULTIRESOLUTION ROUGH TERRAIN MOTION PLANNING

We describe a new approach to the problem of motion planning for mobil e robots on natural, rough terrain, Our approach computes a multiresol ution representation of the terrain using wavelets, and hierarchically plans the path through sections which are well approximated on coarse r levels and relatively smooth, Unlike most methods, the hierarchical approximation errors are used explicitly in a cost function to disting uish preferred terrain sections, The error is computed using the corre sponding wavelet coefficients. We also propose a new nonscalar path co st measure based on the sorted terrain costs along the path, This meas ure can be incorporated into standard global path search algorithms an d yields paths which avoid high cost terrain areas when possible, Addi tional constraints for specific robots can be integrated into this app roach for efficient hierarchical motion planning on rough terrain, We present the algorithms and experimental results for real terrain data.