An intelligent terrain-based navigation system for planetary rovers

©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.DOI: 10.1109/100.973242A fuzzy logic framework for onboard terrain analysis and guidance towards traversable regions. An onboard terrain-based navigation system for mobile robots operating on natural terrain is presented. This system utilizes a fuzzy-logic framework for onboard analysis of the terrain and develops a set of fuzzy navigation rules that guide the rover toward the safest and the most traversable regions. The overall navigation strategy deals with uncertain knowledge about the environment and uses the onboard terrain analysis to enable the rover to select easy-to-traverse paths to the goal autonomously. The navigation system is tested and validated with a set of physical rover experiments and demonstrates the autonomous capability of the system