Ground vehicle path planning on Uneven terrain Using UAV Measurement point clouds

Abstract. The objective of this study is to develop a system to support rapid ground vehicle activities by planning safe travel routes for ground vehicles from point clouds of wide-area uneven terrain environments measured using UAVs. However, fast path planning is difficult in complex environments such as large, uneven terrain environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a new RRT method based on the RRT algorithm that can perform fast path planning, even in complex environments. In the proposed method, narrow areas that are difficult to be explored by ordinary RRTs are first identified in advance, and nodes are placed in these areas to guide the search. When searching with RRTs, the tree is extended via these guide nodes to efficiently traverse the narrow area. In the validation of the proposed method, a comparison was made with RRT and RRT-Connect in two environments, including narrow areas. The results show that the proposed method has a higher route discovery capability, at least two times fewer search nodes and five times faster path planning capability than other RRTs.