Touching without vision : terrain perception in sensory deprived environments

In this paper we demonstrate a combined hardware and software solution that enhances sensor suite and perception capabilities of a mobile robot intended for real Urban Search & Rescue missions. A common fail-case, when exploring unknown environment of a disaster site, is the outage or deterioration of exteroceptive sensory measurements that the robot heavily relies on—especially for localization and navigation purposes. Deprivation of visual and laser modalities caused by dense smoke motivated us to develop a novel solution comprised of force sensor arrays embedded into tracks of our platform. Furthermore, we also exploit a robotic arm for active perception in cases when the prediction based on force sensors is too uncertain. Beside the integration of hardware, we also propose a framework exploiting Gaussian processes followed by Gibb’s sampling to process raw sensor measurements and provide probabilistic interpretation of the underlying terrain profile. In the final, the profile is perceived by proprioceptive means only and successfully substitutes for the lack of exteroceptive measurements in the close vicinity of the robot, when traversing unknown and unseen obstacles. We evaluated our solution on real world terrains.