Physical modeling as a help for planning the motions of a land vehicle

Deals with the problem of planning the motions of a complex land vehicle moving in a natural environment. The contribution presented is a motion generator which predicts the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle when executing a given nominal motion plan. This plan is expressed in terms of a channel to follow and of a set of intermediate subgoals to reach. Solving this motion generation problem requires to explicitly reason about the geometric and the physical aspects of the movements that the vehicle has to execute. In the authors´ approach, this is done using two basic constructions derived from the concept of physical model: the `generalized obstacles´ are used for physically guiding the movements of the vehicle using an explicit model of the vehicle/terrain interactions, and the `physical targets´ are used to map the strategic information onto the physical representation of the world