Abstract
This article presents a robust approach to navigating at high-speed across desert terrain. A central theme of this approach is the combination of simple ideas and components to build a capable and robust system. A pair of robots were developed which completed a 212 kilometer Grand Challenge desert race in approximately seven hours. A path-centric navigation system uses a combination of LIDAR and RADAR based perception sensors to traverse trails and avoid obstacles at speeds up to 15m/s. The onboard navigation system leverages a human based pre-planning system to improve reliability and robustness. The robots have been extensively tested, traversing over 3500 kilometers of desert trails prior to completing the challenge. This article describes the mechanisms, algorithms and testing methods used to achieve this performance.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Amidi O. (1990). Integrated mobile robot control (Tech. Rep. CMU-RI-TR-90-17). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute.
Batavia P., & Singh S. (2002, May). Obstacle detection in smooth high curvature terrain. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2002), Washington, D.C..
Bellutta, P., Manduchi, R., Matthies, L., Owens, K., & Rankin, A. (2000, October). Terrain perception for DEMO III. Paper presented at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IVS 2000), Dearborn, MI.
Biesiadecki, J., Maimone, M., & Morrison, J. (2001, June). The Athena SDM rover: a testbed for Mars rover mobility. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (iSAIRAS 2001), St-Hubert, Canada.
Castelnovi, M., Arkin, R.C., & Collins, T.R. (2005, April). Reactive speed control system based on terrain roughness detection. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2005), Barcelona, Spain.
Coombs, D., Lacaze, A. D., Legowik, S. A., & Murphy, K. N. (2000, October). Driving autonomously offroad up to 35 km/h. Paper presented at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IVS 2000), Dearborn, MI.
Coulter, R. (1992). Implementation of the pure pursuit path tracking algorithm (Tech. Rep. CMU-RI-TR-92-01). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute.
Diaz-Calderon, A., & Kelly, A. (2005). On-line stability margin and attitude estimation for dynamic articulating mobile robots. International Journal of Robotics Research, 24(10), 845–866.
Flores-Parra, I., Bienvenido, J., & Menenti, M. (2000, July). Characterization of segmentation methods by multidimensional metrics: application to the delimitation of structures. Paper presented at the IEEE National Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2000), Honolulu, HI.
Gillespie T. D. (1992). Fundamentals of vehicle dynamics. Warrendale, PA, Society of Automotive Engineers.
Golda, D., Iagnemma, K., Dubowsky, S. (2004, April). Probabilistic modeling and analysis of high-speed rough-terrain mobile robots. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, LA.
Golberg, S., Maimone, M., & Matthies, L. (2002, March). Stereo vision and rover navigation software for planetary exploration. Paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT.
Gowdy, J. (1996). IPT: An object oriented toolkit for interprocess communication (Tech. Rep. CMU-RI-TR-96-07), Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute.
Hart, P., Nilsson, N., & Rafael, B. (1968). A formal basis for the heuristic determination of minimum cost paths. IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics, 4(2), 100–107.
Harvey, W., McGlone, J., McKeown, D., & Irvine, J. (2004). User centric evaluation of automated road network extraction. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 70(12), 1353–1364.
International Standards Organization (1999). Passenger cars test track for a severe lane-change maneuver part 1: double lane-change first edition 1999-10-01, Geneva, CH, International Standards Organization.
Jiang, T.Z., Wu, H., Wu K., & Sun X.W. (2005). Threshold design method of CFAR for millimeter-wave collision warning radar. Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves, 24(3), 217–220.
Kaliyaperumal, K., Lakshmanan, S., & Kluge, K. (2001). An algorithm for detecting roads and obstacles in radar images. IEEE Transactions on Vehicle Technology, 50(1), 170–182.
Kavraki, L., Svestka, P., Latombe, J., & Overmars, M. (1996). Probabilistic roadmaps for path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 12(4),566–580.
Kelly, A. & Stentz A. (1997, January). An Approach to Rough Terrain Autonomous Mobility. Paper presented at the International Conference on Mobile Planetary Robots, Santa Monica, CA.
Kelly, A. & Stentz, A. (1997). An Analysis of Requirements for Rough Terrain Autonomous Mobility. Autonomous Robots, 4(4).
Kelly, A., Amidi, O., Bode, M., Happold, M., Herman, H., Pilarski, T., Rander, P., Stentz, A., Vallidis, N., & Warner, R. (2004, June), Toward reliable off-road autonomous vehicle operating in challenging environments. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2004), Singapore.
Lalonde, J., Vandapel, N., & Hebert, M. (2005, June). Data structures for efficient processing in 3-D. Paper presented at Robotics: Science and Systems 1, Cambridge, MI.
LaValle, S. (1998). Rapidly-exploring random trees: a new tool for path planning (Technical Report). Ames, IA: Iowa State University, Computer Science Department.
LaValle, S., & Kuffner, J. (1999, May). Randomized kinodynamic planning”. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 1999), Detroit, MI.
LaValle, S., & Kuffner, J. (2001). Rapidly-exploring Random Trees: Progress and prospects”. In B. R. Donald, K. M. Lynch, and D. Rus, (editors), Algorithmic and Computational Robotics: New Directions, (pp. 293–308). Wellesley, MA: A K Peters.
Mankins, J. (1995). Technology readiness levels: A white paper. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/trl/trl.pdf.
Nabbe, B., Kumar, S., & Hebert, M. (2004, October). Path planning with hallucinated worlds. Paper presented at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2004), Sendai, Japan.
Nilsson, N. (1980). Principles of Artificial Intelligence. Palo Alto, CA: Tioga Publishing Company.
Oshkosh Truck Corp, Oshkosh, WI Rockwell Collins, Cedar Rapids, IA Rockwell Scientific, Thousand Oaks, CA University of Parma, Parma, Italy (2005). Team Terramax DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 (Technical Paper). OshKosh, WI.
Roth, S. A. & Batavia, P. (2002, July). Evaluating path tracker performance for outdoor mobile robots. Paper presented at the Conference on Automation Technology for Off-Road-Equipment, Chicago, IL.
Roth, S.A., Hamner, B., Singh, S., & Hwangbo, M. (2005, July). Results in combined route traversal and collision avoidance. Paper presented at the International Conference on Field & Service Robotics (FSR’05), Port Douglas, Australia.
Shimoda, S., Kuroda, Y., & Iagnemma, K. (2005, April). Potential field navigation of high speed unmanned ground vehicles on uneven terrain. Paper presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2005), Barcelona, Spain.
Simmons, R., Krotkov, E., Chrisman, L., Cozman, F., Goodwin, R., Hebert, M., Katragadda, L., Koenig, S., Krishnaswamy, G., Shinoda, Y., Whittaker, W., & Klarer, P. (1995, August). Experience with rover navigation for lunar-like terrains. Paper presented at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS’95), Pittsburgh, PA.
Singh, S., & Keller, P. (1991, April). Obstacle detection for high speed autonomous navigation. Paper presented at the IEEE Proceedings International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’91), Sacramento, CA.
Stanford Racing Team (2005). Stanford racing team’s entry in the 2005 DARPA grand challenge (Technical Paper). Stanford, CA.
Talukder, A., Manduchi, R., Rankin, A., Matthies, L. (2002, June). Fast and reliable obstacle detection and segmentation for cross-country navigation. Paper presented at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicle Symposium (IVS 2002). Versailles, France.
Talukder, A., Manduchi, R., Castano, R., Owens, K., Matthies, L., Castano, A., & Hogg, R. (2002, October). Autonomous terrain characterization and modeling for dynamic control of unmanned vehicles. Paper presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2002). Lausanne, Switzerland.
Tompkins, P., Stentz, A., & Whittaker, W.L. (2004, March). Field experiments in mission-level path execution and re-planning. Paper presented at the Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8). Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Trepagnier, P., Kinney, P., Nagel, J., Dooner, M. & Pearce, J. (2005). Team gray technical paper DARPA grand challenge 2005 (Technical Paper).
Ulrich, I., & Nourbakhsh, I. (2000, July). Appearance-based obstacle detection with monocular color vision. Paper presented at the AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Austin, TX.
Urmson, C., Dias, M., & Simmons, R. (2002, October). Stereo vision based navigation for sun-synchronous exploration. Paper presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2002), Lausanne, Switzerland.
Urmson, C., Anhalt, J., Clark, M., Galatali, T., Gonzalez, J.P., Gowdy, J., Gutierrez, A., Harbaugh, S., Johnson-Roberson, M., Kato, H., Koon, P.L., Peterson, K., Smith, B.K., Spiker, S., Tryzelaar, E., & Whittaker, W.L. (2004). High speed navigation of unrehearsed terrain: Red Team technology for Grand Challenge 2004 (Tech. Rep. CMURI-TR-04-37). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute.
Wettergreen, D., Cabrol, N., Baskaran, V., Calderon, F., Heys, S., Jonak, D., Luders, R.A., Pane, D., Smith, T., Teza, J., Tompkins, P., Villa, D., Williams, C., & Wagner, M.D. (2005, September). Second experiments in the robotic investigation of life in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Paper presented at the 8th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Automation in Space (iSAIRAS 2005), Mnchen, Germany.
Yamaguchi, H., Kajiwara, A., & Hayashi, S. (1998, May). Empirical study of polarization techniques for clutter reduction. Paper presented at the IEEE International Radar Conference. Dallas, TX.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Urmson, C. et al. (2007). A Robust Approach to High-Speed Navigation for Unrehearsed Desert Terrain. In: Buehler, M., Iagnemma, K., Singh, S. (eds) The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 36. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73429-1_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73429-1_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73428-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73429-1
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)