A Slope-Adaptive Navigation Approach for Ground Mobile Robots

The 2-dimensional cost map has been widely used for the navigation of ground mobile robot. Although it is effective when the ground is flat, it becomes clumsy and ineffective when the ground has some slopes, where such slopes are often misjudged as the forbidden area by the cost map. For this reason, we propose a slope-adaptive navigation approach based on multilayer cost map in this paper. Instead of taking the point cloud of slope as obstacles, we actively construct a multi-layer cost map that takes slope information into the map in the stage of building environment map. A slope detection algorithm is developed to switch the cost map during the robot navigation. The slope is then considered as a passable road, only with extra cost. In the case that the slope leads the robot to a new floor, we adopt the Aruco code to switch the map information, such that the navigation can still keep working. Both simulation and real-world experimental results demonstrate the high effectiveness of our proposed approach.