The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

A key challenge for autonomous navigation in cluttered outdoor environments is the reliable discrimination between obstacles that must be avoided at all costs, and lesser obstacles which the robot can drive over if necessary. Chlorophyll-rich vegetation in particular is often not an obstacle to a capable off-road vehicle, and it has long been recognized in the satellite imaging community that a simple comparison of the red and near-infrared (NIR) reflectance of a material provides a reliable technique for measuring chlorophyll content in natural scenes. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of using this chlorophyll-detection technique to improve autonomous navigation in natural, off-road environments. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that this feature has properties complementary to the color and shape descriptors traditionally used for point cloud analysis, and show significant improvement in classification performance for tasks relevant to outdoor navigation. Results are shown from field testing onboard a robot operating in off-road terrain.

Keywords

mobile robots, vegetation detection, 3D vision

Notes

Sponsor: DARPA (UGCV Perceptor Integrated)

Associated Project(s): UGCV PerceptOR Integrated

Text Reference

David Bradley, Ranjith Unnikrishnan, and J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell, "Vegetation Detection for Driving in Complex Environments," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April, 2007.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Bradley_2007_5624,
   author = "David Bradley and Ranjith Unnikrishnan and J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell",
   title = "Vegetation Detection for Driving in Complex Environments",
   booktitle = "IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation",
   month = "April",
   year = "2007",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu