Autonomous recognition technology of carrier robot on various terrain environment

Abstract

Field carrier robot can help people carry a certain amount of necessary materials in mountaineering, exploration and other fields, and even help field soldiers carry a certain amount of armaments. However, due to the complexity of the field environment, it is difficult for a robot with a single locomotion mechanism to complete such work. A carrier robot with leg/caterpillar/wheel is proposed. The robot can recognize different terrain environment, so as to select the appropriate locomotion mechanism, and can avoid obstacles and plan the path at the same time. We optimize the traditional ORB algorithm to extract the features of the environment image. The random forest classifier is used to classify the terrain, so as to start the corresponding locomotion mechanism. In addition, the extracted ORB feature points are also used for stereo matching to achieve the depth recovery for environmental information. Based on the analysis of two path planning algorithms of DWA and artificial potential field, an artificial potential field algorithm based on DWA is proposed for robot local path planning. In order to verify the effectiveness of these methods, experiments are carried out on the switching for three locomotion mechanisms and path planning in different practical environments. The results show that when the terrain changes, the robot can effectively switch the locomotion mechanism, and can run stably in different environments.