Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and
simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming
obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in
real-world, extremely rugged, off-road environments, where part of the terrain
(e.g., irregular boulders and fallen trees) will be treated as non-traversable
obstacles. To improve wheeled mobility in those environments with vertically
challenging terrain, we present two wheeled platforms with little hardware
modification compared to conventional wheeled robots; we collect datasets of
our wheeled robots crawling over previously non-traversable, vertically
challenging terrain to facilitate data-driven mobility; we also present
algorithms and their experimental results to show that conventional wheeled
robots have previously unrealized potential of moving through vertically
challenging terrain. We make our platforms, datasets, and algorithms publicly
available to facilitate future research on wheeled mobility.Comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk62ITBGoTI
https://cs.gmu.edu/~xiao/Research/Verti-Wheelers