10 accepted papers
This study addresses the challenge of predicting the terrain traversability of off-road vehicles. When an off-road vehicle is operated on rough terrains or slopes of unconsolidated materials, it is crucial to accurately predict terrain traversability for efficient operations and to avoid critical mo…
This paper proposes a new path planning algorithm to consider motion uncertainty for wheeled robots in rough environments. The proposed method uses particles to express the uncertainty propagation in complicated environments constructed with various types of terrain. Also, RRT (Rapidly-exploring Ran…
This letter proposes a routing framework for heterogeneous multi-robot teams in exploration tasks. The proposed framework deals with a combinatorial optimization problem, and provides a new solving algorithm, for Generalized Team Orienteering Problem (GTOP). In this letter, a route optimization prob
This letter addresses the path planning problem for a rover on deformable, sloped terrains. As such terrains induce high slip and possible immobilization of rovers, finding a path that avoids critical slip is important for traversing the terrains. However, it is difficult to predict rover slippage p
We introduce the concept of Momentum Driven Structures (MDS) made of inertially actuated units linked together by compliant elements as a potential solution for rough environments exploration. We propose a control method for MDS based on the bio-inspired concept of Central Pattern Generator (CPG) an…
This letter presents the hopping performance evaluation on three types of terrains and novel foot pad designs for efficient traverse of hopping rovers. Hopping rovers, called Hopper, are expected to explore scientific richness areas where wheeled vehicles are hard to traverse. In order to succeed in
Ahstract- In this study, we propose a development and formation control of a passive mobile robot equipped only with servo brakes and no motors. The developed passive mobile robot can move forward by utilizing an external pulling force, and steers itself by controlling the servo brakes attached to e…
In this letter, we present a passive spine gripper that can hold rough rocky surfaces of boulders on cliff walls, and we discuss its application to a four-limbed robot for free-climbing in extreme terrain. The limbed robot has four degrees of freedom in each limb, where three are to drive joints of
Unmanned rescue, observation, and/or research vehicles with high terrain adaptability, high speed, and high reliability are needed in difficult-to-reach locations. However, for most vehicles, high performance over rough terrain reduces the travel speed and/or requires complex mechanisms. We have dev…
Identifying terrain type is crucial to safely operating planetary exploration rovers. Vision-based terrain classifiers, which are typically trained by thousands of labeled images using machine learning methods, have proven to be particularly successful. However, since planetary rovers are to boldly