SMARTY: Point-Based Range Processing for Autonomous Driving
A critical component of mobile robot systems is the ability to detect regions of the environment in which the vehicle should not travel. This is an especially important problem when a robot operates outdoors at relatively high continuous speed. In on-road driving, obstacles have to be detected at long range and very quickly to allow enough reaction time at high speeds. In cross-country driving, unsafe regions of the terrain also have to be identified at long range with the added requirement that simple strategies such as elevation thresholds do not work because of the complexity of the terrain. Without making any distinction, we will refer to regions of the environment in which the vehicle is not allowed to drive as obstacle regions or as untraversable regions.