2013 Volume 79 Issue 11 Pages 1117-1123
Recently, many studies for autonomous mobile robot are being conducted for applications in outdoor environment and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) in particular is getting much attention. Most of those studies focus on environment where an autonomous vehicle can separate navigable area from non-navigable area clearly. Therefore, conventional approaches can have troubles in classification in off-road environment, where navigable areas cannot be obviously identified. To overcome this problem, we propose an approach which enables a UGV to autonomously identify where it can safely steer for. First, we propose to use linear Support Vector Machine for terrain classification in off-road by extracting multiple features. Second, we propose an implementation of potential-based method for extracting traversable direction. The performance of the proposed approach was verified in an off-road environment and it was shown that the proposed method is superior to a conventional approach.