Ladar System Identifies Obstacles Partly Hidden by Grass

A ladar-based system now undergoing development is intended to enable an autonomous mobile robot in an outdoor environment to avoid moving toward trees, large rocks, and other obstacles that are partly hidden by tall grass. The design of the system incorporates the assumption that the robot is capable of moving through grass and provides for discrimination between grass and obstacles on the basis of geometric properties extracted from ladar readings as described below. The system (see figure) includes a ladar system that projects a range-measuring pulsed laser beam that has a small angular width of radians and is capable of measuring distances of reflective objects from a minimum of dmin to a maximum of dmax. The system is equipped with a rotating mirror that scans the beam through a relatively wide angular range of in a horizontal plane at a suitable small height above the ground. Successive scans are performed at time intervals of seconds. During each scan, the laser beam is fired at relatively small angular intervals of radians to make range measurements, so that the total number of range measurements acquired in a scan is Ne = / .