Learning and prediction of vehicle-terrain interaction from 3D vision

Wheel-terrain interaction plays a critical role for vehicle mobility on natural terrain, such as in agricultural, planetary exploration and off-road settings. Estimation of the terrain characteristics and the way they affect traversability is essential for the vehicle to better plan its safest and energy-efficient path. This work proposes a novel approach to learn and predict from a distance the motion resistance encountered by a robotic vehicle, while traversing natural soil, by using visual information from a stereovision device. To this end, terrain appearance and geometry information are first correlated to resistance torque measurements during a learning phase via two alternative regression approaches, namely Least-Squares Boosting and Long-Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network. Then, such a relationship is exploited to predict motion resistance remotely, based on visual data only. Results obtained in preliminary experimental tests on ploughed and compact terrain are presented to show the feasibility of the proposed method.