Toward Wheeled Mobility on Vertically Challenging Terrain: Platforms, Datasets, and Algorithms

Aniket Datar, Chenhui Pan, Mohammad Nazeri, Xuesu Xiao

Keywords: Wheeled Mobility, Vertically Challenging Terrain, Motion Planning

Abstract: Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world, non-flat, off-road environments, where part of the terrain (e.g., steep slopes or rugged boulders) will be treated as non-traversable obstacles. Our work is motivated by such limitations and aims at expanding the mobility of these widely available wheeled robot platforms so that they can venture into vertically challenging environments, which would otherwise be deemed as obstacles (non-traversable) or require specialized hardware.

Submission Number: 1