Traversability Metrics for Urban Search and Rescue Robots on Rough Terrain V' Molino, R' Madhavan, E

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Traversability Metrics for Urban Search and
Rescue Robots on Rough TerrainV. Molino, R.
Madhavan, E. Messina, T. Downs, A. Jacoff, S.
BalakirskyIntelligent Systems Division, National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

• Three metrics are developed that quantify the
  difficulty a robot would encounter traversing
  rough terrain.
• The metrics are constructed in order to be quite
  general and can be applied to many different
  robot geometries.
• Two different mobility goals are addressed the
  goal of covering the entire region and the goal
  of moving across the terrain.
• Two of the metrics are computed for several NIST
  step fields.
• The numerical results obtained from these step
  fields are analyzed and the strengths and
  weaknesses of these metrics are discussed.