Shared autonomy system for tracked vehicles to traverse rough terrain based on continuous three-dimensional terrain scanning

Tracked vehicles are frequently used as search-and-rescue robots for exploring disaster areas. To enhance their traversability on rough terrain, some are equipped with “active flippers.” However, manual control of such flippers also increases the operator´s workload, particularly for teleoperation with limited camera views. To eliminate this tradeoff, we developed a shared autonomy system using an autonomous controller for flippers that is based on continuous three-dimensional terrain scanning. In our system, real-time terrain slices near the robot are obtained using three laser range sensors, and these are integrated to generate three-dimensional terrain information. In this paper, we introduce the autonomous controller for the flippers and validate the reliability of the shared autonomy system through experimental results on actual rough terrain.