Aerial Image Analysis for Estimation of Ground Traversal Difficulty in Robot Navigation

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for aid in unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigation makes it possible to plan routes more efficiently. Aerial images contain information about the environment that would be hard to obtain from the surface. This can be exploited to provide ground robots with route instructions. Digital image processing and computer vision techniques can identify regions of interest for UGV traversal. This article brings forth the concept of traversal difficulty image (TDI) and proposes techniques for TDI computation, with images taken from UAVs as input. We analyze the performance of four techniques and our results show that at least three of them can consistently identify levels of traversal difficulty associated with regions in the input image.