A Global Path Planning Strategy for a UGV from Aerial Elevation Maps for Disaster Response

An approach for global path planning of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is proposed, including basic traversability analysis of the rough terrain to get through. The navigation capabilities of the UGV, in performing such analysis, are considered. The here proposed solution is organized into two following phases: first an aerial scan of the environment is executed by a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and the elevation map of the area is built; after that, a set of processing algorithms is applied to such surface model to derive a 2D costmap (whose costs are based on the prior traversability analysis) which is given as input of a D* path planner. The resulting path can be eventually delivered as a sequence of waypoints for a navigation controller on the field mobile platform.