Terrain-based sensor selection for autonomous trail following

Abstract

We introduce the problem of autonomous trail following without waypoints and present a vision- and ladar-based system which keeps to continuous hiking and mountain biking trails of relatively low human difficulty. Using a RANSAC-based analysis of ladar scans, trail-bordering terrain is classified as belonging to one of several major types: flat terrain, which exhibits low height contrast between on- and off-trail regions; thickly-vegetated terrain, which has corridor-like structure; and forested terrain, which has sparse obstacles and generally lower visual contrast. An adaptive color segmentation method for flat trail terrain and a height-based corridor-following method for thick terrain are detailed. Results are given for a number of autonomous runs as well as analysis of logged data, and ongoing work on forested terrain is discussed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.