Exploration of Surfaces for Robot Mobility

This paper presents an overview of ongoing research in surface exploration at the GRASP Lab. The objective of the work presented here is to design a system that will explore an environment that is unknown and unconstrained and will enable a robot to adapt to varying surroundings. We are investigating the necessary components/modules that must be embedded into a robot for it to have exploratory capabilities. We have designed and are implementing exploratory procedures (ep's) to recover the mechanical properties from a surface given minimal a priori information so that a robot or a vehicle can decide whether to and how to move on this surface. The laboratory setup involves a compliant wrist with six degrees of freedom, mounted on a robot arm, and a laser range finder, mounted on another robot arm, as the primary sensors to detect the response of surfaces with varying mechanical properties.