Path planning of a novel angled-spoke based robot in a terrain mixture of granular media and ground

Abstract

Search and rescue mission on a landslide disaster site requires locomotability on both granular media and ground because crashed soil behaves as granular media. Indeed, navigation in granular media accompany slippage and it implies possibility of being stuck in the sand and m. Therefore, it is important to find optimal path to locomote in a terrain mixture of granular media and ground. This research presents path planning algorithm minimizing total revolution of angled spoke-based wheel(ASW) in a terrain mixture of granular media and ground. Physically meaningful definition as effective distance is used to calculate cost function. In order to define effective distance traversable difficulty was defined. This cost function is examined usng   algorithm. Traversable difficulty varies with slope angle and revolution speed of ASW is modeled empirically. 32 experimental points were selected and meta model was formed by interpolating them. When algorithm searches adjacent node, slope  is achieved. Evenly distributed 50 points of revolution speed and traversable difficulty at the speed are extracted and regressed with summation of sinusoidal functions. Then minimum traversable difficulty is achieved. Three cost determination methods such as effective distance based varying and fixed revolution speed of ASW, and actual distance based are examined in four different scenarios. Effective distance based varying revolution speed of ASW showed the shortest total effective distance to reach the target.