An anisotropic fast marching method applied to path planning for Mars rovers Articles uri icon

publication date

  • July 2019

start page

  • 6

end page

  • 17

issue

  • 7

volume

  • 34

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0885-8985

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1557-959X

abstract

  • This paper presents the application of the Anisotropic Fast Marching Method to the path planning problem of mobile robots moving in outdoors environments, such as Mars. Considering that at any point on a 3D surface there are two main slopes: the maximum, which is the slope of the gradient, and the minimum, the height map of a terrain can be considered as a tensor filed. Using the Anisotropic Fast Marching Method, the resulting trajectory of the path planning takes the tensor field into account so that the slopes in the trajectory are minimized. Numerical simulations are presented to show the advantage of this method over its isotropic version. Besides, the influence of the anisotropic index and the traversability of the resultant paths are analyzed.

subjects

  • Robotics and Industrial Informatics

keywords

  • aerospace robotics; mars; mobile robots; path planning; planetary rovers; trajectory optimisation (aerospace)