Motion planning for all-terrain vehicles: A physical modeling approach forcoping with dynamic and contact interaction constraints

This paper addresses modeling and global motion planning issues for an auto nomous wheeled mobile robot moving on an uneven three-dimensional (3-D) ter rain. We focus particularly on the issue of dealing with dynamic and wheel/ ground interaction constraints. A key feature of our approach is that it in corporates appropriate physical models to cope with the task dynamics in th e motion planning paradigm. The planner is based on a two-level scheme, The high level considers a simplified two-dimensional (2-D) instance of the mo tion task and searches a subset of the configuration space of the robot in order to generate nominal subgoals through which the robot is steered, The local level solves for continuous feasible trajectories and actuator contro ls to move the robot between neighboring subgoals in the presence of the en tire task constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Impl emented planner that solves for feasible trajectories to be performed by a wheeled vehicle on quite complex terrains. Simulation results are presented for the case of a six-wheeled articulated robot.