Characterization and Traversal of Pliable Vegetation for Robot Navigation

Outdoor mobile robots currently treat vegetation as obstacles that need to be avoided. In order to have less conservative robots that fully exploit their motion capabilities, it is required to obtain models of the interaction of vegetation with the vehicle. This work proposes and experimentally verifies models of interaction of wheeled and tracked vehicles with pliable vegetation. In addition, a methodology to map perceptual features of the environment to resistive forces experienced by the robots is presented.