Autonomous navigation of mobile robot in radiation environment with uneven terrain

In order to protect people from nuclear radiation, nuclear emergency robots are widely used in radiation environment. Except for the obstacle avoidance, these robots should also consider the radiation quantity (or dose rate) and the complex land slope. However, current navigation methods are insufficient to cover all these factors for nuclear emergency robots. In this paper, an autonomous navigation method is proposed for nuclear emergency robots. Firstly, a multi-layer costmap, which includes the costmap of radiation and the costmap of traversability, is proposed as the input of the path planner. Then, an A* algorithm with heuristic function of distance, radiation and slope is employed to search the global path. Finally, a multisensor data fusion algorithm is implemented for the real-time localization and motion control of the robot. Both simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed autonomous navigation method can plan a reasonable path and control the robot to reach the target safely in a complex radiation environment.