Online Incremental Learning of the Terrain Traversal Cost in Autonomous Exploration

In this paper, we address motion efficiency in autonomous robot exploration with multi-legged walking robots that can traverse rough terrains at the cost of lower efficiency and greater body vibration. We propose a robotic system for online and incremental learning of the terrain traversal cost that is immediately utilized to reason about next navigational goals in building spatial model of the robot surrounding. The traversal cost experienced by the robot is characterized by incrementally constructed Gaussian Processes using Bayesian Committee Machine. During the exploration, the robot builds the spatial terrain model, marks untraversable areas, and leverages the Gaussian Process predictive variance to decide whether to improve the spatial model or decrease the uncertainty of the terrain traversal cost. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been experimentally verified in a fully autonomous deployment with a hexapod walking robot.