A Terrain-Based Path Planning for Mobile Robots with Bounded Curvature

Recent advances in robotics have led to the development of autonomous vehicles that navigate in outdoor environments. A fundamental premise for a mobile robot to perform a navigation task in an efficient and safe way is to calculate the path previously to its execution. Several path planning algorithms are only concerned with finding a route between the initial and the goal position, without taking into account the characteristics of the vehicle that would eventually perform it. Another important issue to be considered is the cost of performing the path, since a shorter path cannot be the best choice depending on the terrain where the robot navigates. This paper presents a path planning methodology for nonholonomic vehicles with curvature constraints that takes into account the different characteristics of the terrain in the environment.