Organization of measurements and identification of obstacles in studying a surface with an automatic mobile vehicle

The present paper presents a measurement method which can be used to determine the traversability of a surface by an automated mobile vehicle. One basic problem in the design of such a vehicle is the compilation of a detailed relief map for evaluating the traversability of a given surface region. The large amount of data obtained in accomplishing such a task may overload the vehicle's on-board computer. The proposed method is designed to reduce the number of measurements required to evaluate the traversability of the surface. The method reduces to a stepwise organization of measurements, in which relatively rough and infrequent measurements are used to identify large obstacles, while more accurate and frequent measurements are used to identify small ones. The possibility of false surface identification is analyzed and an expression is obtained for the initial measurement frequency required.