Environment characterization and path optimization to ensure the integrity of a mobile robot

This paper is about preservation of physical integrity of mobile robot for real outdoor applications encountered in agricultural field. Unlike other approaches that try to detect and to avoid obstacle, we consider the allowable speed grid. This grid depends on the vehicle capabilities, its dynamic constraints, its speed and the 3D rendering of the environment. We made a dynamic study to estimate the acceleration of the inertial center of a vehicle taking into account the geometry of the environment and the trajectory to follow. Then, we establish a perception strategy to efficiently use the computing resources of the navigation system. The objective is to focus the attention where the danger may potentially appear. Then, we propose a decision process which consists to select the speed by optimizing a criteria linked to the mission objective.