Terrain evaluation and its application to path planning for walking machines

Motion planning of walking machines normally contains two aspects: gait planning and body trajectory planning. When generating an optimal body trajectory on natural terrain, the leg movement must be taken into account. Due to the large searching space resulting from the combination of leg movement and terrain conditions, it is quite time consuming to produce an optimal result of body trajectory planning. In this paper, an effective method of body trajectory planning is introduced by virtue of a terrain evaluation that links the terrain conditions with machine mobility. Based on the evaluation, a potential field is constructed for graph searching. Best first planning (BFP) is adopted to search the optimal path. The path generated with the proposed method could offer the best opportunity to place the machine feet moving with a certain gait over a rough terrain. The assumptions and shortages associated with the present work are also discussed.