Exploration of 3D terrains using potential fields with elevation-based local distortions

Mobile robots can be used in numerous outdoor tasks such as patrolling, delivery and military applications. In order to deploy mobile robots in this kind of environment, where there are different challenges like slopes, elevations, or even holes, they should be able to detect such challenges and determine the best path to accomplish their tasks. In this paper, we are proposing an exploration approach based on potential fields with local distortions, in which we define preferences in uneven terrains to avoid high declivity regions without compromising the best path. The approach was implemented and tested in simulated environments, considering a ground robot embedded with two 2D LIDAR sensors, and the experiments demonstrated the efficiency of our method.