A Robust Approach to High-Speed Navigation for Unrehearsed Desert Terrain

This article presents a robust approach to navigating at high-speed across desert terrain. A central theme of this approach is the combination of simple ideas and components to build a capable and robust system. A pair of robots were developed which completed a 212 kilometer Grand Challenge desert race in approximately seven hours. A path-centric navigation system uses a combination of LIDAR and RADAR based perception sensors to traverse trails and avoid obstacles at speeds up to 15m/s. The onboard navigation system leverages a human based pre-planning system to improve reliability and robustness. The robots have been extensively tested, traversing over 3500 kilometers of desert trails prior to completing the challenge. This article describes the mechanisms, algorithms and testing methods used to achieve this performance.