Configuration-Space Flipper Planning for Rescue Robots

For rescue robots, flippers endow the robot with additional ability to pass through various terrain. Also, autonomous capabilities become more important, especially with respect to autonomous motion including flippers. In recent work, autonomy for flippers is done by either planning with several special states or based on collected data. We are considering if it is possible to find a way to build continuous states without collecting old trail data. In this paper, we first model the possible states as a global planning path with parameter configuration of the scene. Then, we follow the path to achieve the autonomous run. We plot the morphology of each path points to show the correctness of the path and implement a simple path following on real robot to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.