Design of Mission-Based Traversability Assessment (MeTA) Tool for Unmanned Vehicles

In this study, we develop an extensible framework, titled "Mission-Based Traversability Assessment (MeTA) Tool", that produces a more informative map of traversability based on specific situational contexts in a platform agnostic fashion. The aim of this map is to help make traversability-based decisions in complex outdoor environments. This is critical for making sound navigational decisions at the highest level, particularly when engaged in autonomous maneuver. The MeTA tool performs this by filtering out regions that should be avoided by the autonomous vehicle, utilizing a number of mechanisms that can be specified and customized based on the planning context.